By Peggy Hirsch
YellowTimes.org Guest Columnist (United States)
Continued suicide bombings in Israel, along with the Bush administration's recent media blitz on the inevitability of terror in the U.S., make clear that the anti-terror policies of these two governments have not worked. Counting myself among the silenced 15 percent who have not supported the War on Terror, I wonder if the nation is sufficiently recovered from its patriotic high to ask: "Are we working towards a solution, or failing to address root causes?"
Pragmatists ask only if our policies will work. Our current policy probably will not because we have not defined terms or an objective. A war is an armed conflict between nations or factions that is declared, fought and a truce signed at its end. It has an end. It has sides. Armies fight wars, although modern war is also waged on civilians. We would like warfare to be limited to those nations we have armed and for those causes of which we approve. Freelancers used to be called guerillas, now they are called terrorists.
The word "war" is often used in conjunction with ideas. We had the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, but these are not really wars at all. The word is attached to a social endeavor to describe the earnestness in which it is being prosecuted. Ideas, such as "people shouldn't be poor" or "people shouldn't take drugs" live in people's minds. A commander pushing troops around on one of those dandy 3-D situation-strategy maps cannot outflank them.
The ideas in people's minds are hard to change. We have armies of professionals who wage a War for Opinion. They use techniques of persuasion: plays to emotion, desire to conform, slogans to bypass critical thinking, presentation of selected facts, negative and positive association, repetition, misdirection - an arsenal of techniques used to enlist you into their army of opinion. Once enlisted, you are a foot soldier, whether the cause is actually in your best interests or not.
Before we brashly declared the War on Terror, we should have honestly asked ourselves, "Why do they hate us?" Bush said that they hated our freedom and way of life. Is that really reason to travel halfway around the world to die just to cause us pain? I think the answer to that question is "No" and we know it. But it's easier to let such lies stand than admit this country has never taken responsibility for its own hand in creating such hatred. We have never had an airing of our own covert operations during the Cold War that, if we were honest, would now be called state-sponsored terrorism.
The Cold War also wasn't a real war; it was a war between two ideologies: Capitalism and Communism. Socialism, practiced by most of the free world in some form, bridged the two. Capitalism has been elevated to a religion in this country, and we have purposely forgotten that it has shortcomings. Sure, it creates wealth and vitality, but its brutish treatment of workers gives rise to social problems. Communism sought to solve those problems, but failed because it denied freedom of the full expression of human nature and was corrupted by the absolute power of the state. Capitalism should heed that lesson as it, too, seeks absolute power. Capitalism worked best when it was regulated.
In the Cold War we fought Communism by every means, including terrorism. We overthrew governments, carried out assassinations and undermined economies. We created an industry to do so, one that has grown ever more secretive in the name of national security. Its budget is increased despite admissions of misspent and missing funds, despite questions about how well secretive agencies have served national security. It is an industry we are not expected to question but simply trust.
We won the Cold War, but when wars don't have two sides and an end, unexpected things can happen. The industry of war didn't just close up shop and move away. It started a new war, the Cultural War, which enlisted many citizens by making them think the war was on their behalf. The idea that conservative Americans are more moral than liberal Americans found an army of ready foot soldiers. The enemy was America's socialistic structure. It's hard to believe now, but the mantra of this war was to get "government off our backs." We didn't want to pay taxes or be told what to do. More accurately, business didn't want to pay taxes or be regulated. Business used the Cultural War as a shield while it took the rights formerly conferred upon citizens. The country went from being socialist to being the United States of Corporate Citizens.
While the Cold War became the Cultural War domestically, internationally it became the War Over Globalization: free trade versus fair trade. These are the same issues that caused the original fight between Capitalism and Communism: if you give business too much power, the people suffer. If you choke off business, then everyone is poorer. This is the same issue that the American people fought for and gained the worker's rights that created a middle class and promoted stability to the benefit of workers and business. Regulation, socialism if you will, is the only solution western civilization has yet devised to temper capitalism, just as a system of checks and balances is the only answer proposed to the problem of the corruption of power.
The military and the wealthy continued to fight the Cold War Over Globalization in a way that really didn't serve the citizens of this country or the people of the world. The wealthy have won; they control the media, institutions, and governments. The people of the world, who are poorer - not richer - under globalization, have suffered under corrupt and inept governments that we propped up. They have seen their cultures under siege from a global culture - one that you and I know is not really all that attractive - isn't that one reason we've fought our own Cultural War? Protest was ridiculed. Uncooperative governments faced coups, now called "regime change." There became no way to work within the system. Americans simply gave up and did their best to ignore the monster we helped create.
Now, our economy is collapsing because corruption grew like a cancer in the unregulated era of government favors and deals, unreported by a complicit media. Our system of elected representation and our free press have been co-opted by international corporations who have no loyalty to our nation. We have a military-industrial-complex that claims super-patriot status, yet it frequently operates in secrecy and has probably caused much of the anti-American sentiment we see today. Under the patriotism banner, the defense industry offers solutions that coincide with their own ambitions. They can only pursue their own reason for being, which for corporations is always the bottom line. They would never admit to being part of the problem.
And, of course, our support for Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands hurts us hugely. We do not see what the rest of the world sees, probably because Americans are presented with a very one-sided version of events over there. Israel and America can continue to pretend that we don't care what the world thinks, and that we'll go it alone even if it means World War III. Or we can face up to what the whole world sees: we are letting religious fanatics who are no better than the Islamic fundamentalists set our policies. Also, there are financial interests at play, transferring enormous sums of money from the taxpayer to the defense industry. We could have supported Israel's nobler impulses, just as we could have supported our own. That we face endless war now is, at least partially, our own fault.
We need to confront ourselves with the hard questions such as "Who benefits?" We need to take responsibility for our own part in creating unjust governments that we call democracies, propaganda media that we call a free press, and puppet governments that we describe as freely elected. We need to actually have a free press and representative government before we can strut around the world prescribing it to others. If we did all of this and then found that we needed to protect ourselves, I would be the first to agree. But we have not protected ourselves; we have protected our lies. We have done as the first thing, the thing that should be the last. And the worst of it is that we have given our government an amount of power that we will not be able to take back. The United States of Corporate Citizens now stands completely unaccountable and offers the world a model of rule by global gangsters instead of the rule of law.
Peggy Hirsch encourages your comments: hirsch@mind.net |
