North Korean movies

This is a clip from a 1991 North Korean movie titled “The Girls in my Home Town”. It is not included in the four films discussed below, but it is the only North Korean movie that can be seen on the Internet—or more accurately, an excerpt of that movie. It will give you a flavor of the combination of sentimentality and overheated rhetoric that can be found, however,  in practically all North Korean movies. A review of the movie can be read at http://www.socialistfilms.org/2007/12/girls-in-my-hometown-dprk-1991.html

*****

When I received an invitation from the Korea Society in New York to attend a 4-part screening of North Korean films, I jumped at the opportunity for multiple reasons. To begin with, I am a huge fan of Korean movies, admittedly those that come from the south exclusively. As a relic of the cold war, North Korean movies–like Cuban cigars–are hard to come by. I assumed that they would be much different than the deeply ironic, sophisticated and urbane South Korean movies that I had become devoted to, but was curious to see whether the national culture that had been developing for millennia could still be detected in the dogmatically Marxist north.

While many of the finest South Korean movies are unavailable on home video, you can rent “Save the Green Planet” from Netflix, which summarizes the movie thusly:

Believing that aliens in human form are systematically destroying the planet and all humankind, Byung-gu sets out to capture an alien leader and force him to confess. Because all the aliens look like humans, Byung-gu makes an educated guess and kidnaps the head of a chemical company.

Now, how can you resist such a movie!

I also wondered if North Korean movies would give me insights into one of the two remaining socialist countries in the world, giving the word socialist its broadest interpretation of course. As a long time supporter of the Cuban revolution, my attitude toward North Korea was probably like most leftists. We did not want to see North Korea victimized by economic sanctions or military attack, but there was little to identify with in a society that was bound together by an odd combination of 1930s style Stalinism and centuries old Confucian beliefs.

To understand North Korea would be more imperative than ever given current events. Just as the film series began, an underground nuclear device was detonated in the north and once again the threat level escalated, including the possibility that freighters would be intercepted on the high seas if they were deemed to be carrying nuclear material.

In a move that seemed calculated to deepen the perception of North Korea as a family dynasty, it was reported today that Kim Jong-il had designated Kim Jong-un, his youngest son, as his successor. Although comparisons with Raul Castro taking over from his brother Fidel might be raised by pundits hostile to socialism across the board, one can at least acknowledge that Raul Castro was a central leader of the armed struggle that toppled Batista. But why would the 23 year old grandson of North Korea’s version of Fidel Castro become head of state unless, of course, North Korea was governed as a kind of immense extended family in which blood ties mattered more than talent?

Events in South Korea also reflected the impact of the north. On May 26, former president Roh Moo-Hyun committed suicide Saturday by leaping to his death from a hill behind his house. Roh was the first South Korean leader to cross the demilitarized zone and meet with Kim Jong-il and believed in the tension-easing “sunshine policy” of his predecessor, Kim Dae-Jung. He killed himself after being implicated in a bribery scandal. Street protests by his supporters blame the ruling conservative party for hounding him to the point of no return.

For a summary of the four North Korean movies, go to the Korea Society website. Unfortunately, my own brief takes on the films below cannot be accompanied by a Youtube clip for obvious reasons. But after seeing these four most interesting movies, it did occur to me that North Korea could do itself a big favor by simply making them available on the Internet. Despite their obvious propaganda purpose, they are all distinguished by a charm that would go a long way in breaking down stereotypes about the “rogue state”.

1. Traces of Life (1989)

This is the story of Ji Jun, the widow of a sailor who swims out to an American warship with a mine in his hands and destroys it Kamikaze fashion during the Korean War. The sailor is a true believer in the revolution, while his wife cares more about what goes on in the household. In a change of heart, she decides to return to his farming village and work with the other beneficiaries of land reform to produce food for the revolution. The movie climaxes with her being awarded for presiding over a bumper crop.

Obviously, this movie owes a lot to the Stalinist “people’s hero” movies of the 30s and 40s but it is redeemed by surprising admissions that a collective farm is no paradise. When a disabled sailor is rejected as a member, he reacts bitterly and drowns his sorrow in alcohol. The ties between Ji Jun and her two children are also fairly complex, given the propaganda parameters. They feel that she has not given proper respect to her dead husband, but in the end family and nation are reconciled.

2. The Tale of Chun Hyang (1980)

This is a socialist retelling of a Korean folktale set in the feudal era about a woman from the lower classes who marries a member of the gentry despite her mother’s warning that aristocrats will always betray the poor. At the end of part one of this 148 minute epic, the mother appears to have been vindicated since the husband moves with his parents to Seoul leaving her behind.

Part two of the movie finds the heroine in the clutches of the local magistrate who is bent on turning her into his concubine. Meanwhile, he is oppressing the local peasants by stealing their grain and acting for just like the landowners who made life miserable for the Korean peasant in real life before the revolution. The husband, now a secret royal commissioner, returns in the nick of time to lead a peasant revolt and rescue his wife.

The movie makes liberal use of song, even to the point of approximating an opera. In its synthesis of ancient themes about love and faith and modern ones about the class struggle, it is essentially North Korean.

3. Wolmi Island(1982)

When I was growing up in the 1950s, there seemed to be a Korean War movie about once a month. I still remember “Bridges at Toko-Ri” that resulted in a nomination for best director by the Director’s Guild in 1956. (The director, Mark Robson, was also involved with the liberal McCarthyite “Trial” made two years later.)

Given the flag-waving character of these productions, the perfect antidote is “Wolmi Island”, based on a battle that took place in 1950 which the movie represents as a heroic effort by a small garrison of sailors near Inchon to hold off an American fleet as the bulk of the North Korean army organized an orderly retreat to the North.

I found the battle scenes far less interesting than the interaction between the various characters, including a young female recruit who sacrifices her life in order to restore a communications line that will allow the North Korean guns to resume counter-attack. In all the scenes she appears in, she manages to upstage the male actors.

4. The Flower Girl (1972)

This was my favorite. Set during the Japanese occupation during the 1930s, it tells the story of an impoverished family consisting of a widow and her two daughters that relies on the meager income of the older daughter’s flower sales on the street. The other daughter was blinded by a vicious landlord when she was a tot. There is also an older brother languishing in a Japanese prison. The Japanese rely heavily on the wealthy landowners and their cops to keep the peasants and poor urban dwellers in line.

The most moving part of “The Flower Girl” is her trek to visit her brother in prison. Upon arriving there, she is told that he has died. As it turns out, he has actually escaped from prison and joined the guerrillas. The film ends with a rousing attack on the landlords and the reunion of brother and sisters. All in all, the movie reminded me very much of “Sansho the Bailiff”, a Japanese movie from the 1950s about the cruelty of landlords and the separation of a brother and sister.

*****

Along with a number of other North Korean movies, “The Flower Girl” is analyzed by U.C. Santa Barbara professor Suk-Young Kim in a lecture titled “Kim Jong-il and North Korean Films” that can be seen online at http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=4103. (But not in Firefox. You have to use IE or Safari). Kim also gave a talk at the Korea Society on the opening night of the mini-festival that is not online, however. I cannot recommend her lecture highly enough since it is both illuminating for its insights into the role of North Korean movies and the video clips she discusses in the course of the lecture. You will see a longish excerpt from “The Flower Girl” as well as one from a remarkable Robin Hood/socialist type movie drawn from Korean legend that includes Hong-Kong type martial arts.

In framing her approach to North Korean movies, Kim explains why Kim Jong-il was so keen to promote the medium:

Now, why was film so important for Kim Jong-il, in addition to all the reasons that I laid out here? We tend to think that Kim Jong-il is a leader who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, which is true because he was the biological son of the founding father of North Korea, Kim Il-sung. But we have to think that North Korea is the first hereditary socialist country, where power to rule was passed down from father to the biological son. And before this was officialized, we did not know who the next leader of North Korea would be. I mean, it was certain that Kim Il-sung would handpick somebody before he passed away, but it wasn’t sure if it was going to be his son or somebody else in his political retinue.

So in a way, Kim Jong-il had to really work his way through — he had to use whatever talent he had to really pave the road to power. And he was — he is known to be an extremely talented artistic person by all accounts, and he tapped into his artistic talent to really prove his filial piety for his father, Kim Il-sung. And this is an extremely interesting fact if we consider how North Korea is still observing traditional Confucian values of patriarchy, and in this light, the nation itself is seen as an extended family structure. So to respect and preserve the authorial power of the patriarchal national leader was extremely important.

And another factor that plays into this rationale is that Kim Il-sung, the founding father of North Korea, lived long enough to have witnessed de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union, and whatever happened to the Maoist legacy after the Culture Revolution. So he was extremely keen on preserving his legacy after death, and in this sense Kim Jong-il effectively used film to really create this mythical aura about his father and perpetuate his legacy by creating these everlasting images.

Whatever one thinks about North Korean society, surely it makes sense to reduce the tensions between the U.S. and the beleaguered state. In going through Bruce Cumings’s essay “Decoupled from History: North Korea in the ‘Axis of Evil’” that appeared in the 2004 “Inventing the Axis of Evil: The Truth about North Korea, Iran, and Syria”, you are struck by how the potential for war has always been heightened by U.S. refusal to accept a non-capitalist system on its own terms. Given the hostilities that have existed since 1945, the defensiveness of the North Koreans begins to seem normal. As someone once put it, even the paranoid have enemies.

Most leftists probably have the same impression that I do, namely that the U.S. intervened on behalf of the south after war with the north began. Cumings makes a convincing case that the conflict dates back much earlier, when the U.S. decided to back the landlords and corrupt officials who had collaborated with the Japanese during the 30s and 40s–in other words, the same villains who made life miserable for the poor in “The Flower Girl”. Considering the brazen disrespect shown for Korean independence, it is no wonder that the propaganda movies of the 1980s exhibited such passion. Despite being propaganda, they were rooted in the lived experience of the nation.

In 1945 the U.S. occupied southern Korea and set up a three-year military government that was directed from the Yongsan military base in Seoul that the Japanese built in 1894. James R. Hodge, the American commander, took over the executive mansion known as “the blue house” that the Japanese governor-general had occupied.

Hodge then decided to build up a bureaucracy using the same discredited civil servants who had been trained for military government in Japan, a complete slap in the face to Koreans who had fought on the side of the allies in helping to liberate East Asia from Japanese rule.

During Japanese occupation, a powerful leftwing movement had developed in the south that was completely independent of Kim Il-Sung. This mattered little to the U.S. which considered all grass roots movements together as pawns of the Kremlin. Merrell Benninghoff, chief political advisor to Hodge, reported:

Southern Korea can best be described as a powder keg ready to explode at the application of a spark.

There is great disappointment that immediate independence and sweeping out of the Japanese did not eventuate.

[Those] Koreans as have achieved high rank under the Japanese are considered pro-Japanese and are hated almost as much as their masters.

All groups seem to have the common ideas of seizing Japanese property, ejecting the Japanese from Korea, and achieving immediate independence.

Korea is completely ripe for agitators.

The most encouraging single factor in the political situation is the presence in Seoul of several hundred conservatives among the older and better educated Koreans. Although many of them have served with the Japanese, that stigma ought eventually to disappear.

William Langdon, another State Department hack, appeared to agree with the North Korean propaganda film’s assessment of the old regime but put a plus where the Communists put a minus:

The old native regime internally was feudal and corrupt but the record shows that it was the best disposed toward foreign interests of the three Far Eastern nations, protecting foreign lives and property and franchises. I am sure that we may count on at least as much a native government evolved as above…

South Koreans rose up against the quisling government without any assistance from the North and were brutally repressed throughout 1946 to 1948.

Eventually, an anti-Communist government stabilized in the south and the two parts of the country found themselves on a collision course. The George W. Bush’s of the day who advocated preemptive war saw the Korean War as an opportunity to roll back the revolution in both the north and in China, Korea’s main ally. Carpet bombing of the north, as well as other punishing measures, left two million dead half of whom were civilians. With a population in the north of just under 10 million at the time, this was the equivalent of 60 million dead Americans. Considering the response of the U.S. to the loss of just 3000 of its citizens on 9/11, the North Koreans appear almost Gandhian by comparison.

In 2000, during the final days of the Clinton administration, it appeared that a thaw between the U.S. and North Korea was developing as reported by the NY Times on October 20:.

Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright said tonight that “important progress” had been made in her talks here with North Korea’s leader toward persuading North Korea to “restrain missile development and testing, as well as missile exports,” though any final agreement will have to await further talks.

Missile specialists from the United States and North Korea will meet next week to explore further the specific ways in which North Korea will limit its missile program, she said.

In particular, a quid pro quo of shutting down the missile program in exchange for launchings of North Korean satellites by foreign governments will be discussed further, a senior official said.

The idea was first raised in talks in July between President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and the North Korean leader.

The six hours of talks between Dr. Albright and the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, were the first between such a high-level American official and a North Korean leader.

“Everyone leaves here rather struck by the breadth and depth of the discussions,” the senior official said. This was largely because the Americans heard firsthand from Mr. Kim, the only decision maker who counts in this country, “what he was prepared to do.”

The two-day visit ended on a cordial note. As a parting gift, Dr. Albright presented a basketball autographed by Michael Jordan to Mr. Kim, who turns out to be an ardent fan.

As they said their farewells in the lobby of a government guest house tonight, Dr. Albright encouraged Mr. Kim “to pick up the telephone any time,” an American official said. And Mr. Kim, — the leader of one of the few countries to deny its people Internet access but who is himself a keen Internet browser with three computers in his office — replied, “Please give me your e-mail address.”

One of Dr. Albright’s goals on this trip was to plan for a possible visit here by President Clinton, but she declined to be drawn out on whether Mr. Clinton would come. Instead, she said she would report to Mr. Clinton on the results and it was up to him to make the decision.

Another goal was to assess the North Korean leader who, in his six years in office, has remained virtually unknown as a personality or a policy maker. His father, Kim Il Sung, founded the Communist Party here and ruled the country with an iron hand until his death in 1994.

Dr. Albright said that after negotiating with Mr. Kim and socializing with him at two dinners and at the performance in honor of the 55th anniversary of the North Korean Communist Party, she found him a “very good listener, a good interlocutor.” And she added, “He strikes me as very decisive and very practical.”

Not a year later, the WTC and the Pentagon had been attacked by Islamic terrorists and a new more aggressive foreign policy based on “preemptive” warfare was implemented. Along with Iran, North Korea became a “rogue state” whose leader was depicted as a madman rather than the “very practical” official that she was ready to exchange email addresses with.

It is difficult to predict whether Obama will ratchet up tensions with North Korea given all the other foreign policy adventures he has on his plate revolving around the need to subdue the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One only hopes that the antiwar movement in the U.S. will have the internal resources to oppose war across Asia given what is at stake. While one can have all sorts of opinions on the North Korean social system, we can all agree that another Korean War would be a disaster for its people as well as for working class Americans who will bear the brunt of the fighting.

Norman Solomon: there’s no there there

Not a day goes by without some left-liberal taking Obama to task for either warmongering abroad or cozying up to Wall Street billionaires at home. Their information is often very useful but when it comes to analyzing why Obama does what he does no matter what liberals write, there’s no there there, as Gertrude Stein once said about her hometown Oakland.

The latest example of this is Norman Solomon’s article in the latest Counterpunch, titled “The Democrats and the Afghan War: Meet the New Escalators“. Taking off his gloves and showing no mercy, Solomon writes about what some people are beginning to regard as Obama’s Vietnam:

Over the weekend, the Sunday Times of London reported that U.S. drone attacks along the Afghan-Pakistani border on Saturday killed “foreign militants” and “women and children” — while Pakistani officials asserted that “American drone attacks on the border . . . are causing a massive humanitarian emergency.” The newspaper says that “as many as 1 million people have fled their homes in the Tribal Areas to escape attacks by the unmanned spy planes as well as bombings by the Pakistani army.”

After neatly dismantling Obama’s excuses for intervening in what he calls Pakeestan, Solomon reveals what the liberal-left has up its sleeves if the president doesn’t straighten up and fly right:

For those already concerned about Obama’s re-election prospects, such war realities may seem faraway and relatively abstract. But escalation will fracture his base inside the Democratic Party. If the president insists on leading a party of war, then activists will educate, agitate and organize to transform it into a party for peace.

Is Norman Solomon out of his mind, or what? Activists have about as much of a chance of transforming the Democratic Party into a “party for peace” as I do in winning the next American Idol contest. My wife, who has heard me singing in the shower, can back me up on this. It is particularly shocking to hear this kind of reformist claptrap at a time when the Democratic Party has demonstrated its true colors in defiance of the people who voted for its candidates.

There is open discussion in the mass media about the clear class divide between the people who run the party and the voters. Evan Thomas, a Newsweek editor, described how “the ruling class” views the chumps who vote for their politicians:

By definition, establishments believe in propping up the existing order. Members of the ruling class have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much the way they are.  Safeguarding the status quo, protecting traditional institutions, can be healthy and useful, stabilizing and reassuring.

He goes on to include himself as part of this ruling class.

As the financial crisis deepens, there will be more and more discussion about the 800 pound gorilla that people like Norman Solomon are anxious to ignore. As anger grows over finance capital’s domination of the government, ordinary people will be looking for explanations why the Goldman Sachs of the world get bailed out, while auto workers get screwed. Even members of the ruling class propaganda machine that Evan Thomas belongs to will be pressured into not only calling attention to the gorilla, but warning it to back off. The latest example is former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson’s Atlantic Monthly article titled “The Quiet Coup“ that describes the government as a virtual financial oligarchy run by Goldman Sachs and company:

The oligarchy and the government policies that aided it did not alone cause the financial crisis that exploded last year. Many other factors contributed, including excessive borrowing by households and lax lending standards out on the fringes of the financial world. But major commercial and investment banks-and the hedge funds that ran alongside them-were the big beneficiaries of the twin housing and equity-market bubbles of this decade, their profits fed by an ever-increasing volume of transactions founded on a relatively small base of actual physical assets. Each time a loan was sold, packaged, securitized, and resold, banks took their transaction fees, and the hedge funds buying those securities reaped ever-larger fees as their holdings grew.

Given the obvious power of big corporations over the Democratic Party, it is rather disingenuous for Norman Solomon to talk about capturing it from such people and turning it into an instrument of peace or social justice. But you have to remember that Solomon dubbed Ralph Nader “a de facto ally of the current emperor (i.e. Bush)” when he ran as an independent in 2004.

There is a certain naiveté at work in his analysis, as if the divide in the Democratic Party could be resolved through any kinds of activism. What exactly does he have in mind? Lobbying Congress? When you read about Senator Charles Schumer’s wallowing in the troughs of investment banks in the New York Times, you can only conclude that a visit to his office by housing activists et al is a complete waste of time.

Lately I have become more sensitized to the power of big foundations over the wing of the liberal-left movement that Norman Solomon resides in. He founded the Institute of Public Accuracy in 1997 with a $200,000 grant from the Stern Family Fund, a foundation that was spawned from the fortune left by Julius Rosenwald of Sears Roebuck. The IPA depends on funding from other such foundations today, including the Stewart Mott Charitable Trust (Mott is a GM heir), the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Wallace Global Fund (from Reader’s Digest). I imagine that all these generous benefactors believe in the need for remedying the abuses of the capitalist system, all the while stopping short of measures that would undermine the system that allows them to fund the IPA as well as penthouses on Fifth Avenue.

I have vivid recollections of Tecnica’s executive director Michael Urmann paying a visit to Stewart Mott in his Fifth Avenue penthouse in 1989 when we trying to get funding for a major expansion of our volunteer program in Southern Africa. Apparently Mott was more interested in watering the plants in his rooftop greenhouse than hearing our spiel. Urmann told me that he thought that Mott held his supplicants in contempt even as he felt validated in writing them the occasional check.

Speaking for myself, I think that our movement would be better off trying to find a way to fund itself through small donations on the Internet rather than relying on liberal foundations especially when they are hardly interested in any kind of structural change that would challenge their funding sources: major corporations.

In doing research lately on George Soros, with an eye to writing a history of Bard College, I keep coming back to Joan Roelofs, the professor emerita of Keen College who wrote “Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism”. In the conclusion of that book she observes quite presciently-considering the fact that it was written during a period of relative prosperity-that foundations are the last defense of a decaying economic system:

The liberal foundations undoubtedly will continue their attempts to fix up the economic system, constructing epicycles if that would prolong capitalism. They, and the World Bank, are well aware of the poverty and inequality that remain even in the richest country. We can expect that nonmarket techniques, such as microcredit, individual development accounts, and subsidized employment, will continue to be piloted by foundations and advocated for full-scale government adoption. It would not be surprising if elites joined the basic income guarantee movement, echoing the “negative income tax” proposal proffered by conservatives in the 1970s.

Ultimately, the 1930s’ proposals for economic planning may be revived and the myth of the “free market” gently laid to rest. In that case, whether we would have fascism, socialism, corporatism, or something else would depend on who is framing and creating new institutions. Compassionate liberals often advance solutions to poverty that require more wasteful and polluting production. At one time, it was thought that the military-industrial complex, without actual war, would provide adequate economic stimulus. It may be that permanent war, which burns surplus faster, will be the winner.

Hearts and Minds; FTA

Great news. Two of the outstanding documentaries of the Vietnam War era are now available, one in the theaters and the other on DVD. “Hearts and Minds” opens at the Cinema Village today and is not only the finest documentary of the period, but arguably the finest political documentary ever made. You can also order “FTA” from Netflix, a movie that both documents Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland’s legendary challenge to Bob Hope’s UFO shows and the amazing response of active-duty GI’s who by 1971 were sick and tired of Hope’s cheesy, warmongering “entertainment”, and more importantly the war it cheered on.

Michael Moore goes even further than me. He calls Peter Davis’s “Hearts and Minds” the best movie ever and adds that it was the movie that inspired him to pick up a camera. Indeed, you see what an influence it was on Moore and indirectly on so many other documentary film-makers who when they were imitating Moore were truly imitating Peter Davis. One of the brilliant insights of “Hearts and Minds” is to use footage of old newsreels and movies that reflected the Red Scare mentality that made the Vietnam War possible, a device used by Moore and so many other directors. There is nothing like a brief scene from a McCarthyite warhorse like “My Son John” to remind you how deep the paranoia ran in the 1950s and remained enough of a force to allow people like LBJ to sell the war to the American people.

The title “Hearts and Minds” is an ironic commentary on LBJ’s assurances that “The ultimate victory will depend on the hearts and minds of the people who actually live there.”

Using interviews with people on both sides of the debate, Davis reminds us of how deep the divide over Vietnam was. The pro-war personalities were both frightening and pathetic, including the mother and father of a Harvard graduate who died in Vietnam. While the father says that his son’s sacrifice was necessary to uphold American stature overseas, the mother idly plays with a model jet fighter.

It was the pilot of such a fighter who looms largest in Davis’s movie as a symbol of the madness of war. We see a welcome home parade in Linden, New Jersey for George Coker, a bomber pilot who was shot down over Vietnam and spent over 6 years in a prison camp. Once he returns, he makes the lecture circuit telling schoolchildren and their mothers how important it is to defeat Communism. When a student asks what Vietnam was like, he answers that except for the people, it was very pretty. He thanks the mothers for their harsh discipline at home which helped him become a warrior. They were scarier to him than the “gooks” who imprisoned him.

Davis also allows prominent government officials to explain why they supported the war, including Walt Rostow who was the Paul Wolfowitz of his day. Rostow can barely conceal the contempt for the interviewers who have the nerve to ask him whether the war was defendable. By 1974, when the movie was made, the war was obviously going bad for the USA, thus making Rostow all the more compellingly peevish.

On the antiwar side, Daniel Ellsberg is powerful and lucid as might be expected. Coming from a background similar to Coker’s, Ellsberg is just one among thousands of establishment figures who grew to oppose the war, even at the risk of prison.

But the most moving parts of the movie are the interviews with the Vietnamese who share their losses of either property or loved ones with the interviewers. For those who are too young to remember Vietnam or who want to be reminded of how courageous its people were in the face of overwhelming military superiority, “Hearts and Minds” is a must.

Screening information is at the Cinema Village website.

The letters “FTA” stand for “Fuck the Army” and were also used by the antiwar movement to mean “Free the Army”. Both usages are found liberally in this 1972 movie that tracks Jane Fonda and company across the Pacific Rim as they perform for adoring GI and local audiences.

In an 20 minute extra on the DVD, we learn that the revue came out of a suggestion made by antiwar medic Howard Levy who believed that a corrective to Bob Hope’s gung-ho shows was needed.

The skits can be described as a mixture of old-time vaudeville and agit-prop that sends up the military after the fashion of “MASH”. Since Donald Sutherland had starred in the 1970 movie, he was a natural for the FTA revue. Jane Fonda had already become one of the most prominent antiwar figures in the U.S., along with Mohammed Ali and Dr. Benjamin Spock. Both are fascinating to watch as they wring laughter and applause from the enlisted men.

But the most amazing part of the movie is the interviews with the soldiers themselves who have reached the point of open rebellion, even to the point of wearing their hair long and growing beards. It was obvious that several years of massive demonstrations in the U.S. had emboldened soldiers to challenge their superiors in one way or another. When they are in Japan, the performers hook up with the sailors on the aircraft carrier Constellation who had circulated a petition demanding that it withdraw from the war. It was signed by nearly 1500 crewmen!

FTA was released in July 1972 and shown at selected theaters around the country, but in less than a week it was pulled from distribution. That same month Jane Fonda went to Hanoi. The movie is now being shown for the first time since 1972 largely as a result of the efforts of David Ziegler, the director of the very find “Sir, No Sir“.

“FTA” is not to be missed.

The Liberal Defence of Murder

Richard Seymour’s The Liberal Defence Of Murder

by Louis Proyect

Book Review

Seymour, Richard: The Liberal Defence of Murder, Verso Press, 2008, ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-240-0, 358 pages.

(Swans – February 23, 2009)   To get straight to the point, Richard Seymour’s The Liberal Defence of Murder is a masterpiece of intellectual history and political agitation that is to the early 21st century what Julien Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs was to the post-WWI period. One supposes that as long as capitalist war continues to plague humanity, there will be a need for such a book every generation. Richard Seymour’s astonishing accomplishment is to rise to the occasion on his debut literary undertaking. Making a seamless transition from the blogosphere to the printed page, the young man associated with the popular Lenin’s Tomb blog proves that an old-fashioned book still has its uses.

In a sense, I am the ideal reader for such a book since I have had many of the same concerns as Seymour going back to the outbreak of war in Kosovo a decade ago. Some of the doubts I had about liberal opinion in the first Balkans war in Bosnia now came to a head as I saw one prominent intellectual after another cheering for the NATO bombing of the Serb republic. Many of them had come of age politically during the Vietnam War, including Michael Ignatieff. Despite having ostensibly learned to dig beneath their government’s justification for war after the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, many an ex-peacenik was now ready to join the bandwagon for war in the Balkans. They were now ready to believe that the Serbs had slaughtered Kosovar civilians in Racak, just as some intellectuals took LBJ at his word when he blamed the Vietnamese for attacking American destroyers without provocation.

As it turns out, the Michael Ignatieffs of this world were simply reverting to form as Richard Seymour ably demonstrates in a tour de force of intellectual history. As accustomed as I was to this sordid history after doing some of my own research over the past 10 years, I was not prepared for the examination of more than 200 years of imperialist apologetics of the kind we now associate with Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Norm Geras, et al. The most startling revelation for me was how widespread this tendency was, even among writers I had always considered unblemished.

Take, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville who I knew only as a sharp commentator on American society in the 19th century who defended French colonialism’s right to impose its will on Algeria on the basis of its Arab citizens being “half-savage.” Tocqueville also dismissed American Indians and African slaves as being incapable of participating in a democracy for the same reasons.

full: http://www.swans.com/library/art15/lproy52.html

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.