War Made Easy

Now playing at the Quad Theater in New York, “War Made Easy” is the definitive study of how the mainstream media in the United States permitted itself to be used as a propaganda outlet of the Bush administration in the run-up to the war with Iraq. It places “embedded” journalism in the larger context of pro-war media going back to the early stages of the Cold War, and is particularly adept in making comparisons with the war in Vietnam. Just as the Gulf of Tonkin incident—an attack on American destroyers by Vietnamese patrol boats that never really happened—was used as a pretext for getting into Vietnam, so were false reports on weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein ties to al Qaeda used for this most recent imperialist debacle.

Norman Solomon

Serving as expert witness in this documentary written and directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp is Norman Solomon, an expert on corporate media abuse and author of the 2006 book “War Made Easy” that the movie is based on. (Narration is provided Sean Penn.) Solomon is a longtime associate of the media watch group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting), a group that was founded in 1986 largely to challenge the mainstream media’s incestuous relationship to the Reagan administration. At the time, I was very involved with Nicaragua solidarity and found FAIR’s exposure of newspaper, radio and television bias on behalf of the contra war most useful. Unfortunately, due to the utter corruption of the mainstream media in the U.S., there will always be a need for a watchdog group like FAIR. My own organization went out of business shortly after the Sandinistas were voted out of office in 1990, but FAIR soldiers on responding to the blizzard of lies from our “free press”.

George W. Bush

Using the same kind of polished video editing techniques found in Jon Stewart’s Comedy Central News Show, “War Made Easy” allows CNN, Fox-TV, CBS, NBC, ABC et al to hoist themselves on their own petard. Using one key “talking point” after another that demonstrates media complicity with the war, the movie presents a medley of talking heads marching in lock-step with the administration. I was particularly struck by how television news programs all got caught up in military technology. One idiotic reporter after another is seen selling the merits of smart bombs, B-2 bombers, attack helicopters, etc, as if they were in an infomercial. Closely related to the fixation with hardware was the blatant reliance on retired generals and admirals even before the war began. All of them treated the war as an accomplished fact and no reporter bothered to ask whether the war was necessary.

There was one exception to the rule, however. Phil Donohue made a point of challenging the administration’s lies on MSNBC. For that effort, he was removed from the air by the brass who stated in a memo that the show was becoming a “home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

“War Made Easy” shows how many of these knuckle-headed pro-war newsmen (and women) did a mea culpa after a couple of years when it became clear to the world that the justifications for the war were false. Additionally, it became harder and harder to wave the flag when it became obvious that it was a lost cause. In other words, the failure to win a victory on the battlefield led to a loss in fighting spirit among the media, especially its more liberal elements. Wolf Blitzer of CNN is shown confessing to another reporter that his network was all too gullible when it came to the administration’s case for war. “We should have been more skeptical,” he says.

Despite the reversal of many reporters (excluding the mouth-breathing hawks at Fox-TV) on Iraq, there are signs that the media is coming home to daddy once again as reports of General Petraeus’s “surge” achieve a kind of consensus among the political elite. When the Democrats begin to backpedal on the war, it automatically follows that CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, and the N.Y. Times will follow suit.

That is one of the reasons that the arrival of “War Made Easy” is so timely. The film reminds us of the monstrous lies and indifference to human suffering that the mainstream media is responsible for. It would spur us into renewed opposition, even if the Democratic Party candidates prefer to ignore Iraq.

If “War Made Easy” is not playing in your city, the DVD can be purchased for only $19.95 from the movie’s website.

 

Hitting the Empire where it hurts

Support our Troops–Bring them home now!

Although I am reluctant to devote any attention to the bizarre groupuscle on the U.S. left called the Socialist Workers Party, some recent research I have been doing on the Vietnam antiwar movement was in the back of my mind when I noticed this item from their newspaper, the Militant.

‘Support our troops’ slogan is concession to Washington’s prowar propaganda

BY LEA SHERMAN

The city council in Berkeley, California, rescinded a decision to send a letter to the Marine Corps Recruiting Station telling the recruiters they were “unwelcome intruders.”

The council adopted a resolution February 13 to “publicly differentiate between the city’s documented opposition to the unjust and illegal war in Iraq and our respect and support for those serving in the armed forces.” The resolution said, “We deeply respect and support the men and women in our armed forces.”

Advancing such a position is a disorienting concession to the U.S. government’s patriotic prowar propaganda. It strengthens Washington’s ability to wage war.

As far as I can tell, this sectarian position was first put forward in 1990 on the occasion of the first war with Iraq. Although the archives for the Militant do not go back as far as that year, there is a reference to the 1990 position in a 1998 article titled “Lessons For Today From The Working-Class Campaign Against 1990-91 Gulf War“:

In addition to the disorientation that can come from the propaganda of the bourgeois war makers, “individuals and currents from the petty bourgeoisie - sometimes because of the depth of their shock at the horrors of war, and their fear of the consequences -lose their moorings and get drawn into the undertow of one or another section of the war makers and their political parties,” the article by Barnes in the ISR explained. Resisting the patriotic pressures transmitted by these middle-class layers is of the utmost importance for class-conscious workers. One of the forms this pressure took before and during the Gulf War was the slogan, “Support our troops - bring them home,” put forward by many radicals and pacifists.

While many SWP veterans, including me, are generally aware that the slogan “Support our troops, bring them home now” was used during the Vietnam era, I think most of us assume that we favored something more sharp-edged like “Out Now”. As it turns out, we had no problems with the “support” slogan in the antiwar movement as this excerpt from Fred Halstead’s “Out Now!” illustrates. Back then, the real divide was over “now”, not “social patriotism”, as the Militant in its current ultraleft version would lead you to believe. Fred is referring to a workshop in an organizing conference for the October 21, 1967 March on the Pentagon:

The workshop on mass action adopted the march on Washington idea overwhelmingly, recommending the date of October 21 and the theme: “Support Our Boys in Vietnam—Bring Them Home!” (The original proposal was for “Bring Them Home Now!” But there were still some forces who objected to the inclusion of “now” in a central slogan. The SMC, however, used the “now” in its publicity and it produced the bulk of the posters, buttons, etc., advertising the event. By the time of the demonstration, the Mobilization Committee itself was including “now” with no objections.)

Here’s a photo by the late Brian Shannon that appears in Fred’s book:

In a recent discussion about the SWP on the yahoo mailing list I set up for a postmortem examination of this once important group on the left, Adam L. took note of the fact that the SWP’s only interest in today’s antiwar protests is as a place to sell books. Ironically, they don’t sell Fred Halstead’s:

As someone involved in the anti-war movement up to my eyeballs, I got a lot of value from re-reading Out Now, and it’s something I recommended to other activists, including people in our (now-defunct) Solidarity branch.

The SWP’s only involvement–quelle surprise–was to set up a literature table at these protests. The funny, yet sad, part? They didn’t even have Halstead’s book on the table.

I made a point in that discussion that applies here as well. When a left group revises an important part of their program, they owe the rest of the left and the working class an explanation of why they changed their line and why they had come to a wrong position to start with. This is not done in the spirit of Maoist self-criticism, but simply to educate the movement. I wrote:

That’s one of the really puzzling things about the SWP nowadays. It feels under no particular compulsion to answer anything, the cushy living standards of its proletarian leaders or line reversals. We used to laugh at the CPUSA in the 1960s as a party that was notorious for changing positions without explaining why. When Stalin signed a pact with Hitler, their line became pacifist. When Hitler invaded Russia, the line changed overnight to backing all-out war. People like us who have read the Militant in recent years were stunned by the idiotic line on Iraq when it first appeared, but just as stunned when that line was no longer defended. For all the loose talk about Bolshevism here, Lenin never would have allowed something like that to happen, nor Fidel Castro. Revolutionary parties are obligated to explain major policy shifts. What the SWP does, of course, is its own business but nobody should mistake it with the Bolsheviks or the Cuban CP.

The Death of Mark Daily

Mark Daily

In the latest Vanity Fair magazine, there’s a particularly offensive article by Christopher Hitchens on Mark Daily, an American soldier who was killed by a roadside bomb in Mosul, Iraq. Hitchens had learned from an LA Times article forwarded by one of his few remaining friends that Daily was inspired to enlist after reading Hitchens.

The LA Times article states:

After the 9/11 attacks, Daily was not convinced that a military response was the best option. In his MySpace essay, he runs through the gamut of reasons he used at one time or another to argue against confronting the Taliban and Saddam Hussein: cultural tolerance, the sanctity of national sovereignty, a suspicion of America’s intentions. Weren’t we really after their oil? he wondered.

Too bad that Daily didn’t live long enough to read Alan Greenspan’s memoir. He might have saved his family a lot of grief and Hitchens the opportunity to grandstand in the pages of Vanity Fair.

After initial reservations about the “war on terror,” the LA Times reports that Daily decided to join the military after being exposed to Hitchens’s warmongering:

Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him. A 2003 phone conversation with a UCLA ROTC officer on the ideals of commitment and service impressed him.

The LA Times article tries to convey the impression that Mark Daily was an example of the kind of pro-intervention liberal that NY Times op-ed scribbler Roger Cohen hailed in yesterday’s edition:

Liberal interventionists, if you recall, were people like myself for whom the sight in the 1990s of hundreds of thousands of European Muslims processed through Serbian concentration camps, or killed in them, left little doubt of the merits, indeed the necessity, of U.S. military action in the name of the human dignity that only open societies afford.

Without such action in Bosnia and Kosovo, Europe would not be at peace today.

One reluctant liberal interventionist signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that said: “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein.” His name was Bill Clinton. Baghdad is closer to Sarajevo than the left has allowed.

For this left, anyone who supported the Iraq invasion, or sees merits to it despite the catastrophic Bush-Rumsfeld bungling, is a neocon. That makes Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik and Kanan Makiya and Bernard Kouchner neocons, among others who don’t think like Norman Podhoretz but have more firsthand knowledge of totalitarian hell than countless slick purveyors of the neocon insult.

Cohen wrote this article to redeem the whole idea of military adventures in the name of democracy in the aftermath of nearly five years of neconservative horror in Iraq. It is basically a defense of Bill Clinton’s foreign policy against George W. Bush’s. One wonders why such a distinction is being made after watching the Democrats bowing and scraping before the President over the past few weeks. If Hillary Clinton gets elected, it will lead to a continuation of Bush’s policies. I should mention that this is not something that I read in Counterpunch, but that I heard straight from the horse’s mouth:

As Bush was describing his thinking about Iraq and the future, he indicated he wants to use his final 16 months to stabilize Iraq enough and redefine the U.S. mission there so that the next president, even a Democrat, would feel politically able to keep a smaller but long-term presence in the country. The broadcasters were not allowed to directly quote the president, but they were allowed to allude to his thinking and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News later cited the analogy of Dwight D. Eisenhower essentially adopting President Harry S. Truman’s foreign policy despite the Republican general’s 1952 campaign statements.

“He had kind of a striking analogy,” Stephanopoulos said of Bush on air a few hours after the lunch. “He believes that whoever replaces him, like General Eisenhower when he replaced Harry Truman, may criticize the president’s policy during the campaign, but will likely continue much of it in office.”

According to the LA Times, Mark Daily started off in life quite a few degrees to the left of Bill Clinton.

His family says he became a registered Democrat who read voraciously and delighted in fervent debate. He read liberal intellectual Noam Chomsky, conservative Sen. John McCain of Arizona and everything in between.

His first passions were animal rights and environmental protection, prompting him to become a vegetarian and Green Party member in high school for a few years. He defended American Indian rights so loudly in one backyard debate that Linda Daily imagined the neighbors would think it a family brawl. His heroes were immigrants because “they risk their lives to achieve better ones,” he wrote on his MySpace page.

Leaving aside the characterization of Noam Chomsky as a “liberal intellectual,” the rest of it seems fairly plausible. Daily obviously believed in human rights and all the rest, but sadly could not reconcile his beliefs with his conduct, especially in light of the fact that he decided to join the military in October 2006 and not in the aftermath of 9/11. One can understand somebody like Pat Tillman making such a mistake but there was far too much water under the bridge in late 2006 to assume that any good could have come out of fighting in Iraq.

On Myspace, Daily tries to explain why he joined:

Maybe the reality of politics makes all political action inherently crude and immoral. Or maybe it is these adventures in philosophical masturbation that prevent people from ever taking any kind of effective action against men like Saddam Hussein. One thing is for certain, as disagreeable or as confusing as my decision to enter the fray may be, consider what peace vigils against genocide have accomplished lately. Consider that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics. Often times it is less about how clean your actions are and more about how pure your intentions are.

With all due respect to the late Mr. Daily, this sounds more to me like adolescent turmoil than anything else. As I tried to point out in my review of Ken Burns’s “The War” the other day, many GI’s entered the service as a kind of rite of passage and Mark Daily does not sound that different from those who went off to kill Japs or Nazis. Indeed, the LA Times reports: “Daily had read historian Stephen Ambrose’s writings on World War II and the generation of soldiers who fought for freedom from the forces of fascism.” Meanwhile, he describes himself on MySpace thusly: If you really want to understand me, watch Schindler’s List followed by Saving Private Ryan.” Perhaps, the main person to blame for poor Mark Daily’s early demise is Stephen Spielberg rather than Christopher Hitchens.

The WWII enlistee did of course have the justification that the enemy did appear to be bent on conquering the world and imposing a regime of torture and exploitation. Any sensible person might have realized that in October 2006 it was the USA that had supplanted the Axis in that capacity.

Somewhere along the line, Daily began to sound more like a neocon than one of Roger Cohen’s liberal interventionists. His Myspace page reports that his occupation is “world police”. That is a striking admission. He also offers up “The Arab Mind” as one of his favorite books. This book was written by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at several US universities, including Columbia and Princeton. Here are a few quotes:

“Why are most Arabs, unless forced by dire necessity to earn their livelihood with ‘the sweat of their brow’, so loath to undertake any work that dirties the hands?”

“The all-encompassing preoccupation with sex in the Arab mind emerges clearly in two manifestations …”

“In the Arab view of human nature, no person is supposed to be able to maintain incessant, uninterrupted control over himself. Any event that is outside routine everyday occurrence can trigger such a loss of control … Once aroused, Arab hostility will vent itself indiscriminately on all outsiders.”

Patai’s book emerged out of obscurity when Seymour Hersh mentioned it in a May 24, 2007 New Yorker magazine article on torture at Abu Ghraib. Referring to the sexual nature of some of this abuse, he wrote:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

One book that was frequently cited was The Arab Mind … the book includes a 25-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression.”

The Patai book, an academic told me, was ‘the bible of the neocons on Arab behaviour’. In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged - ‘one, that Arabs only understand force, and two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation’.

Parenthetically, one wonders how anthropologists can lend themselves to such projects even taking into account the ongoing debasement of the university in imperialist nations. Just today, the NY Times reported that anthropologists are helping the US military in Afghanistan:

SHABAK VALLEY, Afghanistan — In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Extending the analogy of the US empire today to the WWII Axis powers, the answer ostensibly lies in the tendency of a particularly aggressive and increasingly irrational world power to drag everybody into the abyss with it, including many of its intellectuals–not the least of which includes Mark Daily, a young man who should have taken the opportunity to allow his ideas to ripen.

Eavesdropping on a phone conference

Rabbi Michael Lerner

Rabbi Michael Lerner has posted the transcript of a phone conference between major leaders of the mainstream peace movement (himself, Leslie Cagan, Medea Benjamin, et al) and Democratic Congressional “doves” Lynn Woolsey and Jim Moran on his website.

Politic.com explains Lerner’s decision:

A well-known anti-war leader has gone public with the transcript of a private conference call that shows peace activists are exasperated with the Democratic congressional leadership and at a loss for a long-term strategy.

The fact that a UFPJ leader would be in on this phone call is further proof that this coalition is hopelessly wedded to influencing the Democratic Party. In some ways, the war continues because there is not a sufficiently powerful political force inside the US that is seen as a genuine threat by the ruling class parties. No matter how many temper tantrums that Code Pink throws, there will always be the obvious impression that they are trying to influence mommy and daddy. In the 1960s and 70s, the antiwar movement had no interest in cajoling Democratic Party “doves”. It saw its job as raising hell in the streets to the point where both parties would succumb to the pressure. Of course, the antiwar movement of the 1960s tended to be much bigger and more militant because of the military draft. Young people like me saw protesting the war as an act of survival in some ways.

To extend the analogy with trying to get mommy and daddy’s attention, I always felt that becoming radicalized for me was a little bit like discovering that your parents were sexually abusing one of your siblings. Once you make this discovery, you will never see them in the same way. Some children might call the cops; others might take a gun and shoot the offending parent. But you would never sit on their lap again. That’s how I felt about the Democrats after 1967.

Lynne Woolsey kicks off the discussion by defending H.R. 508, a withdrawal plan submitted by her, Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee. Showing the fighting spirit that the Democratic Party has made famous, Woolsey admits that a similarly inspired proposal won’t get to first base: “Oh, well, the Senate won’t pass it, so it won’t get to the president.” Clearly, we’ll never see fistfights breaking out in the halls of Congress anytime soon between the two parties.

It seems that Woolsey has become uncomfortable with how some liberals complain about the Democratic Party caving in to Bush all the time. In particular, an ACLU ad depicting Reid and Pelosi as a couple of sheep was “embarrassing” to her. You can see the ad here:

Tim Carpenter of the Progressive Democrats of America says that his group has been working hard. It sent over 9,000 emails to Nancy Pelosi’s office in the last three weeks demanding that she support a peace proposal. If Pelosi is not moved by Code Pink staging a hunger strike on her front door, I doubt that she will be moved by 9,000 emails. I get about that much every day from the widows of Nigerian oil ministers. Woolsey tries to break the news to Tim Carpenter that email might not matter all that much: “Because people aren’t in the streets, because they’re electronically communicating, it’s easier for the Congress or the media to pretend that it isn’t happening, but it isn’t visible.”

Woolsey advises the conferees that they should focus on the moderate Democrats, who are gumming up the works:

Ok, here’s something. I believe that Nancy (Pelosi) is with us, and she’s counting on you guys and Barbara and Maxine and me to push from the Left in the Congress. But the people that need to hear are the moderate Democrats who are holding up the whole thing. They’re the ones who have to know that their people care, that they bring our troops home. They swear they don’t. They swear that they’ll lose their elections if they do the right thing.

This paints a dreary picture, doesn’t it? The blame keeps getting shifted in American bourgeois politics. It is a just like a 3-card Monty game. You can never turn up the right card. The leftwing of the Democratic Party says that the party’s moderates are the problem. And then the Democratic Party as a whole says that it can’t do anything to stop the war because it can’t override Bush’s veto. This, of course, is a lie. All the Democrats need to do is not pass a funding bill of any kind. That will bring the war to an end immediately, just as it did in Vietnam. When they continue to fund the war–crocodile tears and all–they are as complicit as the Republicans.

Leslie Cagan, the most left-leaning conferee, throws up her hands and says, “We don’t know how this war’s going to end. This has been a nightmare for five years—almost five years now, before the war began.” But there’s hope. She says that “September is a critical time, in terms of what Congress can do, what they might do, what they probably won’t do.” And if Congress doesn’t get it done next year, there’s always next year:

Beyond that, we’re beginning to look at 2008, as the country has already been forced to, in the election cycle. Both the Congressional and the Presidential races—not that we will support a particular candidate or political party, we certainly will not do that—but again, how do we begin injecting not only ending this war and occupation, but also preventing a war in Iran, preventing any other military operations like this, and beginning to put forward a much more thorough peace and justice agenda, and how to use the election process to work through that agenda.

In other words, mass demonstrations are just an adjunct to the real game, which is the “election cycle.” For those of you living outside the US, this is a buzzword that is used on Sunday morning talk shows. There are “news cycles” and there are “election cycles”. Within each cycle, you get issues and personalities that rise to the top like scum on a stagnant pond. When the cycle is over, things return to normal. Of course, for people living outside the US, like the beleaguered citizens of Baghdad, the “election cycle” might not mean a whole lot when you have to worry about being victimized by a car bomb, thrown out of your house by ethnic cleansing or picked up by a death squad.

To elevate the conversation somewhat, Rabbi Michael Lerner tries to interject some political theory:

Because we know that many people who oppose the war are nevertheless unsure about how the US can get out without making the situation worse and without abandoning its role in the world, we are trying to encourage a national conversation about the fundamentally flawed idea that lies behind the war in Iraq, which is what we call “the Strategy of Domination.” The core bad idea is this: that the world is full of hurtful people who will hurt us unless we hurt them first, that they will dominate us unless we dominate them and so we have no choice but to take strong aggressive action lest they come to our very homeland and attack us. And of course, that could happen, but it will happen because we’ve been acting on that fear for decades, and attempting to dominate the world, in the course of which we’ve spread a great deal of pain and hence generated a great deal of anger.

Silly me. I always thought that war’s take place because the US is interested in protecting its overseas investments and expanding into new areas for super-exploitation. I guess I should go home and burn my Lenin and begin reading transformational psychology textbooks, or whatever fount of wisdom Lerner plucks his platitudes from.

But let’s not assume that Lerner is all pie in the sky. He has concrete proposals:

Specifically, that leads us to advocate for a Global Marshall Plan, and our call to dedicate between 1 and 2 percent of the GDP each year for the next twenty, for the purpose of eliminating global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate healthcare, both domestically and abroad.

1 to 2 percent of the GDP can do that. But the specific Global Marshall Plan only makes sense in the context of a general assault on the underlying ideology that makes this war and every other war seem plausible.

Actually, he has it ass backwards. It is global GDP inequality that leads to ideological differentiation. When there was slavery, a system of ideology had to be produced to rationalize racial inequality–like Black people being closer to the apes, etc. When you have the US controlling something like 75 percent of the world’s resources, you need an ideology to legitimize this. It used to be the need to uphold democracy against Communism. Now it is the need to defeat “Islamofascism”. If there was equality among the world’s population, there would be no need for violence, or philosophical explanations for the status quo.

 

Ruminations on the antiwar movement

Today’s New York Times Magazine has an article titled “Can Lobbyists Stop the War?” which is focused on the efforts of an outfit called Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (A.A.E.I.), an offshoot of moveon.org. It is led by a 32 year old moveon.org veteran named Tom Matzzie, whose most recent strategy “stresses Democratic unity and driving a wedge between Republicans and President Bush.” Matzzie feels that this approach makes much more sense than demonstrating in the streets. The Times explains:

The playbook for opposing a war has changed markedly since the street-protest ethos of the anti-Vietnam movement. Tie-dyed shirts and flowers have been replaced by oxfords and BlackBerries. Politicians are as likely to be lobbied politely as berated. And instead of a freewheeling circus managed from college campuses and coffee houses, the new antiwar movement is a multimillion-dollar operation run by media-savvy professionals.

Matzzie told the paper: “Last time [it] was done in the streets. People were concerned about civil society breaking down. You have to play in politics, which is something we do very explicitly.”

Tom Matzzie: promises not to rock the boat

Matzzie is close to the Democratic Party leadership and meets with Pelosi and Reid about once a month. Last year when the Democrats caved in and gave Bush money to continue the war, Matzzie took the position that to do otherwise would be essentially “a vote for a war without end.” Obviously, Matzzie has loftier career goals in mind than lobbying politicians. This kind of double-speak would qualify him to be a press secretary for Hillary Clinton. Fellow liberals at the grass roots level were less than delighted with his position and accused him of “having been co-opted by the party leaders with whom he frequently rubs elbows.” Mattzie supposedly believes that “political and lifestyle radicalism was a gift to supporters of the Vietnam War that his allies will not give again.”

One of Matzzie’s lieutenants is a middle-aged New Yorker named Alan Charney who feels that the 1960s radicalism got in the way of the movement he had always intended to build. He claims that he “had been waiting for this moment for a long time.” As it turns out, Charney is a former national chairman of Democratic Socialists of America who organized a meeting billed as “Save the Soul of the Democratic Party!” at the DP convention in 1996. Given this, I can certainly understand why he would have found a home in the A.A.E.I.

Earlier this summer, A.A.E.I. and some senior Democrats organized a peace vigil outside the Capitol building. Some rowdy audience members began chanting slogans at the Democratic leaders onstage: “Stop the funding!” and “Stop giving them what they want!” One of them was in such an agitated state that the Democrats onstage privately discussed calling off the rally. Matzzie stepped forward and positioned his imposing frame between the loudest screamer and his masters on stage.

In deference to the need for journalistic balance, the New York Times offers its readers a glance at the “radical” alternative to Matzzie, moveon.org and A.A.E.I. This is embodied in Medea Benjamin’s Code Pink, a group of women who wear pink clothing and put pressure on Pelosi and other Democratic Party leaders to cut off funding for the war. Far be it for me to question the newspaper of record, but I can’t tell any real difference between moveon.org and Code Pink. They both trust the Democratic Party to respond to the wishes of the American people, an act of credulity that can best be likened to sending your social security number to one of those email pitches on behalf of the estate of a deceased Nigerian oil millionaire.

In a September 5^th posting to CommonDreams.org, Benjamin appeared to have given up on persuading Nancy Pelosi to see things her way. After Code Pink had camped out on her doorstep to begin a hunger strike, the top Democrat screamed “Get away from my house” when she saw the activists. One supposes that the activists were seen by “mommy” Nancy Pelosi as throwing a tantrum. It will take more than camping out on her doorstep and going on a hunger strike to turn this millionaire politician around. Meanwhile, Benjamin still proffers advice to Pelosi: “Use your power as Speaker to only allow bills to the floor that include a fixed timeline for withdrawal or stipulate that funds only be used for the safe and speedy withdrawal of our troops.”

Medea Benjamin: will hold her breath until she turns blue for peace

Watching Matzzie and Benjamin grovel before these ruling class politicians makes me appreciate all the more what Osama bin Laden said in his latest communiqué:

So in answer to the question about the causes of the Democrats’ failure to stop the war, I say: they are the same reasons which led to the failure of former president Kennedy to stop the Vietnam War. Those with real power and influence are those with the most capital. And since the democratic system permits major corporations to back candidates, be they presidential or congressional, there shouldn’t be any cause for astonishment - and there isn’t any- in the Democrats’ failure to stop the war. And you’re the ones who have the saying which goes, “Money talks.”

Moving a few degrees to the left of Medea Benjamin, we end up with United for Peace and Justice, a group that ostensibly still tries to mobilize people in the streets after the fashion so despised by Tom Matzzie. It has sponsored some of the larger actions but tends to deemphasize them in election years. Like Matzzie and Benjamin, UFPJ believes that we have to persuade the Democrats to stand up to Bush more forcibly. I get at least one email a week from their chairperson Leslie Cagan urging me to get in touch with my Congressperson. With all due respect to her, I might as well pray to god to hurl lightning bolts at George W. Bush.

With the Communist Party and its split-off, the Committees of Correspondence–a Eurocommunist type formation– sitting in the driver’s seat of UFPJ, I wouldn’t expect anything much different.

In a June 24 article in the CP’s newspaper titled “The dubious history of a slogan,” Tim Wheeler defends a perspective in line with Mattzie and Benjamin’s, namely relying on the Democrats. Using an addled history of the Vietnam War antiwar movement, Wheeler advises against getting too rowdy with the Democrats. Like Tim Matzzie, he is ready to intercede on their behalf especially when it comes to raising “unrealistic slogans” like immediate withdrawal:

When I hear activists opposed to the Iraq war chant, “Out Now,” it brings back memories of 1971, when the slogan “Out Now” was a cause for sharp division in the movement to end the Vietnam War.

Today, as in 1971, the antiwar bloc is growing on Capitol Hill, with Democrats holding a slim majority. Even as we push for the strongest measures possible, we must be supportive of the compromises the antiwar bloc is forced to make to win a bipartisan majority against the war.

The 2008 elections are 19 months away. Having seen what happened to their pro-war colleagues in last November’s election, many Republican lawmakers are beginning to shift on the war. We may well reach a point where a veto-proof majority will approve binding legislation to end the war. The peace movement, representing the vast majority sentiment against the war, can play a big role in pushing that process forward. If we limit ourselves to reciting “Out Now,” we cannot help these lawmakers build that majority. Once again, there is the broader alternative: “Set the Date!” At this writing, a large bloc of antiwar lawmakers is saying they will vote ‘no’ on a supplemental spending bill because a timeline has been removed.

During the Vietnam antiwar movement, the Trotskyists were just as strong as the CP. They would unite periodically with the pacifists in a coalition that would mount powerful demonstrations in Washington and in major cities around the country.

The CP survived the 1960s with enough forces to be able to pull together a movement modeled on Tim Wheeler’s orientation to the Democrats. It is identical to Alan Charney’s approach but with a different pedigree, the Comintern of the 1930s as opposed to Mitterand’s Socialist International. In either case, you are dealing with naked opportunism.

In the mid 1970s, the American Trotskyist leaders became disoriented by the end of the Vietnam War and the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. They worried that the hundreds of members who were recruited in the 1960s, like me, would spread a middle-class virus in the organization and turn it into a counter-revolutionary force. As a prophylactic, they prescribed a pell-mell “turn” to the proletariat which involved getting jobs in basic industry, whether or not there were political openings. To get recalcitrant members like me to make the turn, the leaders made a point of depicting the factories of the US as about ready to rise en masse against the bosses in a general strike. In 1978, a year marked by the Carter presidency, disco and cocaine, we were told that the workers were more radical than at any time in the 20^th century. When I sat in meetings listening to such nonsense, I felt like I was in a Superman episode with the leaders I had so respected being transformed into sectarian nutters. Had Clark been exposed to purple kryptonite or something? Why was he acting so strangely?

Within a decade, the American Trotskyists had lost 80 percent of their members, who voted with their feet.

Shortly before they had committed political suicide, a much smaller group called the Workers World Party began to fill the vacuum they had created. In one crisis after another, they worked with Ramsey Clark to build “coalitions” that would oppose intervention in Panama, Iraq and elsewhere. The reason I put the word coalition in quotes is that they never really were that. A genuine coalition has tensions because they bring together significant political forces with opposing outlooks, like the CP and the Trotskyists in the 1960s. They are difficult to sustain because of contradictions, but they are the best hope for building a mass movement. ANSWER has dispensed with these contradictions by relying on “safe” member groups that would never dream of challenging Brian Becker’s decisions. As somebody who has seen Becker hold forth as if he were Lenin at Zimmerwald, I can’t say that I blame them. It would be an exercise in futility.

So here we are in 2007. ANSWER has called for a “mass march” on Washington next weekend and UFPJ has its own action planned for October 27^th. I imagine that ANSWER’s slogans will ignore Tim Wheeler’s warning not to go too far. We can be grateful for that, I suppose. Meanwhile, I expect the UFPJ action to be larger, even if it is meant more as an appeal to Congress than a threat to the existing order.

Well, as discouraging as all this is, we can take heart at one thing. We know that American capitalism will spawn new wars down the road. As with the scorpion that bit the eagle that flew it across the river, it is in its nature. We need to take a good look at what works and what does not work. Contrary to the views of a hustler like Tom Matzzie, the 1960s are still worth studying. In this war and in wars to come, we must rely on the power of people in the streets and not on the bourgeois politicians with their endless string of broken promises. We may not have the millions of dollars that pour into the coffers of moveon.org and A.A.E.I. but we have the truth on our side and that ultimately is a more powerful weapon.

Camden 28

Howard Zinn with director Anthony Giacchino
and director of photography David Daugherty

The Camden 28 were members of the Catholic left who were arrested after breaking into a draft board in the poverty-stricken city of Camden, New Jersey on August, 1971 with the intention of destroying draft records. Anthony Giacchino’s superlative documentary “Camden 28,” which opens July 27^th at the Cinema Village in New York City, consists of interviews with the Camden 28 today, as well as film and television clips from the 1960s and 70s that remind us why they would risk lengthy prison sentences to oppose the war–including the pre-credit footage of an American GI setting fire to a Vietnamese grass hut with a cigarette lighter.

Beyond the fascination that the film holds as both a historical chronicle and an insight into the character of some remarkable people, it tells a dramatic story that has almost a Biblical dimension, involving as it does faith and betrayal.

The Camden 28 relied heavily on the technical support of Bob Hardy, a parishioner in the Church led by Father Michael Doyle, an Irish immigrant who was one of the ringleaders. Hardy, a handyman by trade and a Marine veteran, went to the FBI as soon as he discovered Doyle’s intentions and agreed to serve as an agent provocateur. He supplied the plotters with the tools that they needed and the advice about how to break into windows, all at the prompting of the FBI.

But Hardy was not a one-dimensional villain. He was sympathetic to their antiwar beliefs to some degree but felt that breaking and entry violated law and order. The FBI promised him that the 28 would be arrested before the break-in took place and that they would either serve no jail time or very little. When he discovered that the FBI planned to prosecute them to the hilt, he broke with the agency and submitted an affidavit on behalf of the defense revealing the degree to which the conspiracy had been funded and organized by the FBI.

When the case finally came to trial in 1973, the jury found the Camden 28 not guilty on all counts. By this time, antiwar opposition had sunk deep roots everywhere in American society, including this jury room. One of the jurors, a widow who owned a woman’s clothing factory, said “There was a strong feeling among the jurors that they wanted to join the defendants in taking a stand against the war.”

However, the foreman of the jury told the press that it was Hardy’s affidavit that convinced them to return a not guilty verdict. By 1973, government misconduct had penetrated public opinion in the same way that it has today.

A few months before the Camden 28 had been arrested, another break-in had occurred at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. The purloined records had been circulated to the press, revealing a pattern of COINTELPRO illegality, including the use of agent provocateurs like Bob Hardy. The FBI was so incensed by the Media break-in that they decided to apply maximum pressure on the Camden 28 so as to extract the identity of the Media conspirators. This meant using an agent provocateur and pressing for long prison terms. As happens so often in cases like this, it backfired and resulted in the freedom of the 28 and another blow against the war in Vietnam. A jury had decided that when justice collided with the law, it was better to act on behalf of justice. Howard Zinn, who is one of interviewees, testified on behalf of the defense at the trial and explained to the jury that civil disobedience is as American as cherry pie.

In the period that the film chronicles, I was deeply involved with the antiwar movement as a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party but felt little connection with the Catholic left or any other practitioners of civil disobedience for that matter. The party had a laser-like focus on mass demonstrations and tended to discount the importance of draft card burning, break-ins at draft boards, etc. Now that I have a broader perspective on things, including the dogmatism of my own organization, I can better appreciate the courage and persistence of the Camden 28, the Berrigan brothers and others.

It would be difficult for anybody watching this very fine documentary not to be reminded of events occurring today, as is probably the intention of director Anthony Giacchino. On a depressingly regular basis, some poor souls are being charged with organizing raids on Fort Dix, plans to blow up the Sears Tower, etc. Without exception, they were being incited by an FBI agent. Entrapment of this sort has a very long and sordid history, going back to the Czar. Needless to say, breaking and entry into a draft board will never be seen in the same light as blowing up a building or bombing a subway, a striking reminder of the difference between the Catholic left and a desperate Islamic radicalism.

While watching “The Camden 28,” I also reflected on the differences between the antiwar movement of today and back then. As has been noted in both the mainstream and radical media, the demonstrations are smaller and less frequent today. There are also obviously fewer acts of civil disobedience today, especially on college campuses. For all of the similarities between the two wars, there is also a key difference. In many respects, the Rumsfeld doctrine was a variation on low-intensity warfare, a strategy devised by the Pentagon to stave off mass demonstrations and civil disobedience as well as the kind of mass radicalization that characterized American society in the 1960s. Warfare “on the cheap,” without the need for a draft, does have a tendency to keep the heat on simmer, but it also has the effect of undercutting the strategic goal of defeating “the enemy.” That is a contradiction for the imperialist bullies to work out. All we can do today is to heighten the contradictions as the peace and justice-loving activists of Camden 28 did in their exemplary fashion.

Film website: http://www.camden28.org/

 

Michael Bérubé: amateur red-baiter

Amateur anti-Communist

As a long-time observer of the “cruise missile left,” I was happy to see Alexander Cockburn nail them in a recent Counterpunch:

The war party virtually monopolized television. AM radio poured out a filthy torrent of war bluster. The laptop bombardiers such as Salman Rushdie were in full war paint. Among the progressives the liberal interventionists thumped their tin drums, often by writing pompous pieces attacking the antiwar “hard left”. Mini-pundits Todd Gitlin and Michael Bérubé played this game eagerly. Bérubé lavished abuse on Noam Chomsky and other clear opponents of the war, mumbling about the therapeutic potential of great power interventionism, piously invoking the tradition of “left internationalism”. Others, like Ian Williams, played supportive roles in instilling the idea that the upcoming war was negotiable, instead of an irreversible intent of the Bush administration, no matter what Saddam Hussein did.

Bérubé, a publicity-hungry Penn State professor who is Alan Colmes to red-baiter David Horowitz’s Sean Hannity, defended himself on Crooked Timber, a group blog that he joined recently and that was made to order for him. This is a gang of underachieving liberal academics with socialist pretensions who spent most of the 90s demanding that the dastardly Serbs be brought to heel and then without skipping a beat cheered on the B-52’s as they rained bombs down on the Taliban. When George W. Bush took the next logical step and invaded Iraq, they responded that this was not what they had in mind. However, a jury would likely have found them guilty of being accessories after the fact. US imperialism certainly saw all these invasions as consistent with each other, even if liberals like Bérubé could not. This would require an understanding of class politics that is sadly missing in the postmodernist swamp he inhabits.

Whenever I think of Bérubé’s attack on antiwar organizers in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, I am reminded of Lillian Hellman’s contemptuous view of the “anti-antifascist left” during the 1930s. These were people who didn’t make a career of bashing Hitler, only bashing the people who had the guts to stand up to Hitler. It is like writing op-ed pieces in the NY Times in 1936 taking the Spanish Republic to task for not disassociating itself from the Kremlin sufficiently. It was bollocks then and bollocks now, as the British say.

It might be useful to review what Bérubé was actually saying 5 years ago, the period described by Cockburn as one of a “filthy torrent of war bluster”. The invasion of Afghanistan had created a powerful momentum to rally around the flag. Todd Gitlin, the Columbia journalism professor linked correctly to Bérubé by Cockburn, had written an atrocious book titled “Intellectuals and the Flag” that lectured the “hard left” for not genuflecting before the stars and stripes.

Bérubé felt inspired by the patriotic fever to write an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education on November 29, 2002 that was a classic red-baiting attack on unpatriotic elements in the antiwar movement. Written just 3 months before the invasion of Iraq, it was an all-out assault on the ANSWER coalition, which for all its faults did at least understand that imperialism had to be opposed in the streets.

Bérubé’s article is titled “Toward an Ideal Antiwar Movement: Mature, Legitimate, and Popular”. All in all, it has the familiar tone of Irving Howe lecturing 1960s radicals about the need to behave. Clearly it was written for the benefit of Bérubé’s peers in academia since anybody in the position to actually organize an ‘ideal’ antiwar movement would not be wasting their time reading a trade magazine for the professorate. He was far more interested in cultivating his own image as an anti-Communist liberal than actually building some kind of alternative to ANSWER. It is doubtful that Bérubé actually organized any kind of protest in his entire life so he wouldn’t know where to start.

In a rare moment of self-awareness, he actually admits to his rather inconsequential nature:

Perhaps I am just an armchair activist, sitting at home in my study, jawing over the fine points of texts, when I should be organizing teach-ins and rallies.

He begins with an anecdote that clearly establishes his national-security mindset. As a 21 year old, he was drawn to an anti-nuclear protest in Central Park in June 1982 but was at odds with most of the participants “in believing that nuclear weapons launched from submarines were a good deterrent.” He decided to grace the demonstration with his presence despite the widespread presence of signs stating that “One Nuclear Bomb Can Ruin Your Entire Day.” In perhaps a concession to youthful impetuousness, he decided not to “think too much about who was organizing the rally.” Bérubé had read in The New York Times that Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger had described the protest as “led by Soviet agents and sympathizers.” That did not worry Bérubé since his crowd “did not, in fact, contain a single Soviet agent or sympathizer.” In reading this nonsense, I am reminded of Joel Kovel’s diagnosis of anti-Communism as a psychiatric disorder.

Moving forward in time, Bérubé is far more tuned in to who is a Red or not:

Twenty years later, the left has begun organizing mass demonstrations against a war in Iraq. But who’s doing the organizing? For the October 6 rally in New York, a group called Not in Our Name, behind which one can find Refuse and Resist!, which in turn has ties to the Revolutionary Communist Party. For the October 26 rally in Washington, a group called Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER), run out of Ramsey Clark’s International Action Center, itself a front for the Workers World Party. The groups involved in the demonstrations thus carry some heavy far-left baggage.

Bérubé’s “mature, legitimate and popular” antiwar movement would be stripped of the “heavy far-left baggage” and have Todd Gitlin’s American flag draped across it. This movement would, in his words, pay Iraqi dissidents-in-exile the respect of taking seriously their longstanding desire for “regime change.” In other words, Ahmed Chalabi would be speaking from the podium rather than Ramsey Clark. This movement would also take seriously “the possibility that Saddam Hussein will not really cooperate with United Nations inspections and will seek to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction.” So instead of demonstrating at the Pentagon, the antiwarriors assembled in the literature professor’s mind would be marching on the Iraqi Consulate demanding that Saddam Hussein liquidate a WMD program that most independent arms monitors described as having been liquidated years earlier.

Finally, Bérubé’s antiwar movement would have insisted that the best alternative to war was the “smart sanctions” that Colin Powell had championed in the early months of the Bush administration. It might be useful to review the motivation behind “smart sanctions” when they were proposed in 2001–before 9/11. As a result of the bad publicity that Clinton era sanctions had generated in the Arab world (remember Madeline Albright’s defense of the sanctions even though they had cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children), there was a powerful momentum to end them. In the face of such pressure, Powell was devising a new strategy that could continue the economic stranglehold on a long-suffering population. Phyllis Bennis explained what the Bush administration had in mind:

Even before September 11th public awareness regarding the impact of sanctions had continued to rise in the U.S., even more so in Europe and with growing outrage across the Middle East. In response, Colin Powell made the replacement of the existing sanctions with a new “smart sanctions” arrangement a cornerstone of his State Department’s approach to Iraq policy. Throughout the first months of the Bush administration in 2001, a new U.S.-proposed sanctions arrangement was under discussion in the Security Council. Officially the proposal was designed to loosen some restrictions on importing food and other goods, while tightening the semi-clandestine oil shipments out and consumer goods in over Iraq’s long and porous borders. In fact, it was a spin-driven proposal, intended primarily as a public relations ploy to undercut growing regional concern about the dire conditions facing Iraqi civilians under sanctions. As originally endorsed by Powell, the new arrangement would have only tinkered with the sanctions’ impact, not reversed them.

In other words, Bérubé would have expected the antiwar movement to embrace a policy that served “primarily as a public relations ploy to undercut growing regional concern about the dire conditions facing Iraqi civilians under sanctions.”

It should be obvious at this point that Bérubé was never serious about building an alternative to ANSWER. He was only interested in red-baiting it out of existence. If you strip away his leftist pretensions, you are left with the same kind of fetid, flag-waving garbage that used to grace the editorial pages of American newspapers during the mass demonstrations of the 1960s and 70s.

When I was in the Socialist Workers Party at the time and busy raising money or passing out leaflets for the antiwar movement, I would periodically be reminded of the kind of witch-hunting mentality that had never been completely expunged with the repudiation of Joe McCarthy.

If you really want to discover where Bérubé got his ideas, the best place to look are the columns of Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, who red-baited the antiwar movement every chance they got. A November 12, 1969 column could have practically been written by our postmodernist professor. It begins:

The tens of thousands of well-meaning war protestors set to converge on Washington Saturday will be joining a demonstration planned since summer by advocates of violent revolution in the U.S. who openly support Communist forces in Vietnam.

Evans and Novak continue in a vein that reads exactly like an FBI dossier:

The link between Hanoi and elements of the New Mobe was again demonstrated Oct. 14 when Premier Pham Van Dong of North Vietnam sent greetings to American antiwar demonstrators. [Fred] Halstead, the Trotskyite leader, drafted a reply to Hanoi approved by a majority of the New Mobe’s steering committee.

Red-baiting such as this has been fully assimilated by people such as Bérubé, Marc Cooper and David Corn who all wrote “exposés” of the Iraq antiwar movement in the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and other corporate media. Unlike our latter-day “antiwar” liberals, Evans and Novak had the honesty to admit that they were professional anti-Communists, a calling that these rank amateurs can only aspire to.

Blessed by Fire

Although it won “Best Film” at the 2005 Havana Film Festival, I was a bit wary of “Blessed by Fire” (Illuminados por el Fuego). Billed as an antiwar film based on the novel/memoir of Edgardo Esteban, a veteran of the Malvinas war in 1982, I wondered if it would portray this ill-fated attempt of the Argentineans to wrest control of their territory as a reactionary adventure on the part of the military government designed to deflect attention from the nation’s economic woes. Although this was certainly part of the motivation, history would record that this has been a burning issue for Argentina going back more than 100 years, whatever the character of the government in power.

The character based on the author is named Edgardo Leguizamón (Gastón Pauls), an 18 year draftee–like Esteban himself–who was sent off to fight in the Malvinas. The film begins with him being summoned to the hospital by the wife of Alberto Vargas (Pablo Ribba) a fellow soldier who has just attempted suicide with a mixture of pills, cocaine and booze. In a series of flashbacks to 1982, we find out about the huge psychic toll the fighting took on the foot soldier. Esteban eventually made a career as a journalist, but Vargas went back to factory work after the war ended. Like most Argentine workers, this was like a continuation of battlefield stress. Instead of dodging British bullets, he dodged unemployment–often unsuccessfully.

The film concentrates on the harsh living conditions, the abuse from superiors and the bloody consequences of facing a much better equipped and trained enemy such men were forced to endure. Although it is about a war, there is not much fighting that goes on except for the final rout just before the Argentines surrender.

In the opening scene, we see the grunts ascending from foxholes and bunkers near a Malvinas beach. Shivering and miserable, they stand at attention while a Lieutenant harangues them about their inadequacies as soldiers and about their invincibility in the coming battle. His remarks fully convey the cognitive dissonance that characterized this misadventure from the beginning. Argentina was hardly equipped to build a national economy, let alone take on the second most powerful imperialist nation in the world. The country’s ruler General Leopoldo Galtieri made the fatal mistake in assuming that the US would back him against Great Britain.

It did not matter in the long run how many trade unionists were killed and tortured by Argentina’s death squads, the American imperialists would never break ranks with their British allies. In 1982, Reagan and Thatcher were in power and clearly saw their common class interests in facing down Soviet communism and any impudent 3^rd world power that stood in their way. The Argentine generals made the mistake in thinking that they belonged to the winner’s club when Washington and London probably referred to them as “dagoes” behind closed doors.

“Blessed by Fire” is directed by Tristán Bauer, a 48 year old from Mar de Plata. He has made documentaries about Eva Peron, Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges. Peron is obviously a symbol of Argentine nationalism, while the two writers are usually associated with a longing for a European identity. This year Bauer announced his attention to make a film about Che Guevara.

“Blessed by Fire” opens at the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in New York and I encourage you to go see it. Although it is not without flaws (mostly having to do with the unwise decision to use a handheld camera, a kind of acid test for independent film-makers nowadays), it is essential viewing for anybody trying to understand the recent history of Argentina and the profound changes taking place on the continent.

Ultimately, Edgardo Esteban’s main complaint was not that a war was fought, but how it was fought. Now nearly 25 years after the Malvinas war, other veterans are making their voice heard.

The Observer (England), January 21, 2007

As the train pulls into the central station of Buenos Aires, Jose is still walking down the aisle hawking a clutch of goods. An olive-green jacket, a patch with an Argentinian flag on his right arm, and a silhouette of the Malvinas Islands signal he is one of the many veterans of the Falklands war supplementing their meagre pensions. What he sells is patriotism - small calendars and stickers bearing the slogan: ‘The Malvinas were, are and always will be Argentinian.’

But he tells a story of betrayal, of himself and 15,000 other veterans of the 1982 war with Britain. In a voice made automatic by repetition, he says: ‘A little help please, I am a veteran of the Malvinas, I have been repeatedly denied jobs simply for being a veteran, my pension is not always enough, I have been forgotten by my country for a long time.’ He has been saying it for 25 years. It is a story repeated by most veterans.

Things have improved, but very late. The most important change came in 1991, when some veterans finally began to receive pensions. The next milestone was the election in 2003 of Nestor Kirchner. He became President on the back of promises on human rights, and increased the pension so the veterans felt able to pull down the green tents they had pitched in front of the government building on the Plaza de Mayo, protesting at lack of compensation and healthcare on the same spot where thousands congregated in April 1982 to cheer the capture of the Malvinas.

But the difficulty of winning a pension is, veterans argue, evidence of neglect which goes back to the war itself. General Leopoldo Galtieri, ‘in his quest to stay in power, had no qualms in sending brave 18-year-old conscripts, with no military training whatever, into a war’, says Norberto Santos, one of those 18-year-olds and now a member of the Centre for Ex-Combatants Islas Malvinas (CECIM). The troops had to endure shortages of ammunition, food, and clothing and suffered from cold, abuse and humiliation by their superiors.

‘Some of us were treated better by the British while in custody in the troop ship Canberra than by the Argentinian forces,’ says Sergio Isaia, another veteran held prisoner. For Santos the war ended when a bomb blew off his left arm. A comrade, thinking he was dying, shot him to end his suffering. Instead, he prolonged it. The neglect continued despite Margaret Thatcher’s victory, the fall of Galtieri and the re-establishment of democracy. One example was the pensions, but the state paid little attention to veterans’ health or post-traumatic stress.

Maria Laura Tapparelli, the widow of Jorge Martire, agrees her husband’s response was to join Argentinian society in forgetting. After 60 days fighting on the Falklands, he returned to La Plata in Buenos Aires province. He found a wife, had three children and studied architecture. ‘He barely spoke about the Malvinas,’ she says. In October 1992, on the way to sit his last exam, he disappeared. He was found later wandering around the city’s main square. He had lost his memory as well as his way. He was hospitalised with symptoms of ‘atypical psychosis’ - what some veterans call the ‘Malvinas syndrome’. One day Jorge was found by the doctors hidden underneath his bed, sheltering from ‘an English bombing’. Early in 1993 he was released. He bought a gun, went to a bar in the city and blew his head off.

Martire - ‘martyr’ in Italian- was far from alone. Suicides are commonplace among veterans, the number - 460, according to CECIM - almost as high as 650 deaths in combat.

Jose says he was unable to find ordinary work because he was a veteran and Santos believes his experiences bear out such claims. He tried to find a job at the municipality of La Plata, his home town, but when he said he was a war veteran he was rejected. A few months later he told another interviewer he had lost his arm in a motorbike accident. He got the job.

Veterans believe that discrimination explains other unusual experiences. Santos married and had three children, but after a few years the couple divorced. His ex-wife told the judge that he was a Falklands veteran and Santos was denied the right even to see his children. ‘I still wander around the courthouse asking what my punishment is for having been on the Malvinas, asking how many years will pass before someone can tell me if I committed a crime,’ he says.

Stories like Santos’s and the suicide of a friend, as well as his own experience of war, drove Edgardo Esteban to write an autobiography which was turned into an award-winning film, Blessed by Fire. Edgardo, too, was 18 when he was sent to fight. ‘The post-traumatic stress was there, but I managed to send it and my ghosts away and to exorcise myself’.

‘The “blessed by fire” are the madmen, the disturbed, the insane, all those veterans that have been forgotten during this past years,’ he says.

In Argentina the film publicised the realities of the veterans’ lives. ‘The movie gave a voice to the voiceless and the silenced,’ he says. ‘After the war, the military asked us not to say a thing. But why not talk about the Malvinas? ‘

When it was shown in London and Manchester, Esteban remembers some British Falklands veterans crying and giving welcoming applause. ‘There was a very nice dialogue with the British then,’ he says. Some of the British veterans he has seen reflected the same realities from a different side. ‘The British now have to avoid any celebration about the war; even with a victory, wars are not to be cheered.’

But the film upset some in the Argentinian armed forces. ‘The armed forces wanted Rambo-style images, but there are no Rambos in a war, just human beings made of flesh and bones.’

Others look for therapy among people. Juan Cantini, a member of the Union of Veterans of the Islas Malvinas, says: ‘Some of my comrades-in-arms have been wandering around trains for ages, as they started to do before they received their pensions, for an economic need. Some today are still walking up and down the trains and buses as a form of therapy, just to clear their minds for a while and to be surrounded by other people - who, unfortunately, still ignore them.’

But for some it may be more important than even therapy. At Retiro station, Jose waits for the next train back to the suburbs. He sold just a few calendars and stickers on the way out and will probably sell a few more on the way back.

‘The trauma is still with me. I have to keep going, I do not want to succumb to other temptations, like suicide.’

Iraq for Sale

 

I was somewhat remiss in not reviewing “Iraq for Sale” immediately after receiving it. Unfortunately it arrived around the same time I received a slew of screeners sent out by the studios in anticipation of the NYFCO awards in December. “Iraq for Sale” should have gone to the top of the heap.

Directed by Robert Greenwald, who has an acclaimed documentary on Walmart to his credit as well, “Iraq for Sale” is a hard-hitting exposé of how companies such as Halliburton-KBR, Blackwater, CACI and Titan used a form of “insider trading” to reap super-profits since the war began. In every instance, the boards of directors of such big contractors are filled with former military men who use their connections to cement sweetheart contracts at the expense of the tax-payer.

If wasting the tax-payer’s money was the only problem, then “Iraq for Sale” might not have the impact that it does. Additionally, it shows how the same hunger for profits resulted in cutting corners in Iraq itself, as GI’s, the supposed beneficiaries of companies like Halliburton-KBR, end up getting the shitty end of the stick. But as might be expected, the worst abuse is reserved for the Iraqi people themselves.

Many people have learned about Halliburton-KBR’s misdeeds as a result of intense scrutiny on its ex-CEO Dick Cheney, as they have learned about Blackwater’s activities in press coverage on the private contracting of security guards (there are 20,000 in Iraq, making it the second largest military detachment after the US military). We should be grateful to Robert Greenwald for new revelations on Halliburton-KBR and Blackwater, as well as first-time investigations of CACI and Titan, two extremely filthy outfits that are hiding under the rocks.

From the film’s excellent website, we learn that CACI (the original name was California Analysis Center, Inc) and Titan provided the interrogators at Abu Ghraib. No matter how bestial the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, they were at least subject to military codes. To this day, not a single CACI or Titan employee has been charged with crimes at Abu Ghraib, even though it is clear that they tortured and raped prisoners.

“Iraq for Sale” makes excellent use of whistle-blowers, including a number of people who went to Iraq originally with gung-ho beliefs in the war. Among them is Ben Carter, a water purification expert hired by Halliburton-KBR who went to Iraq to support the troops and reconstruction efforts. Yet soon after he arrived in Iraq he found KBR/Halliburton cutting essential corners. Carter eventually found the water being supplied to troops was severely contaminated. His testimony to the Senate is found on the film’s website.

This is one of the film’s greatest strengths. By including the voices of disillusioned former employees of the four contractors, it demonstrates the inexorable process of opposition to the war that is coming to a climax now. All across the country, “red state” bastions have finally turned against the war. The men and woman heard in “Iraq for Sale” were their vanguard.

Two of the more impressive are former Halliburton-KBR truck-drivers Bud Conyers and James Logsdon who were disgusted by how their employer wasted tax-payers’ money while giving the soldiers short-shrift. They look and sound for all the world like stereotypical “good ole boys.”

Bud Conyers and James Logsdon

Finally, there are interviews with returned veterans, who have become vocal opponents of the war in Iraq largely on the basis of watching scummy corporations like Halliburton-KBR in action. This film and Patricia Foulkrod’s “The Ground Truth” are extremely useful resources for spreading the word about the turn within the military against a brutal and inhumane war.

“Iraq for Sale” can be purchased for only $12.98 from amazon.com and can be rented from netflix.com. Highly recommended.

Official film website