Only in America?

Another fun tweet today, reacting to the spate of anti-shutdown protests around the US: "Are other countries seeing these types of protests or are Americans being exceptional again?"

A self-styled clown replied: "No, because other countries understand fucking nuance. Demanding people stay at home as much as possible & avoid gatherings during a pandemic where the virus can be infectious & asymptomatic for half a month ≠ tyranny."

This, uh, person is confusing "countries" with people.  I agree that shutdowns for public health reasons do not equal tyranny, but that's not the point.  Does he think that people only protest rationally, with nuance?  I began by recalling pro-Trump rallies in South Korea, by religious nuts every bit as loony as our native wackos.  I wrote about a rally I observed in Seoul in 2017, on the eve of Trump's first visit there, but I see I didn't include any of the photos I took there.  Here's one.

Not only did they believe that Trump would remove Moon Jae-in from office with his bare hands and restore impeached and disgraced Park Geun-hye to the Blue House, they begged him to nuke North Korea.  Luckily, their petitions never came to Trump's attention.

By my next visit a year later, there were weekly marches in Seoul on the same theme, which I wrote about here, with plenty of photographs.  Here's one:

The mixture of US and ROK flags (plus at least one marcher, whom you can see in the post, who carried US, ROK, and Israeli flags) exemplifies the shared sensibility of the Korean and US far right.  There are plenty of contacts between the US and the South Korean far right.  The clown disagreed, saying that these protests had nothing to do with COVID-19 shutdowns, but I was more concerned with the fascist mindset that produced the anti-shutdown protests here.  And I'd really just gotten started.

Another person tried to correct me: "Not true. No other country has people protesting against these stay-at-home orders. Some may not like it, but they aren’t protesting. Outside of the US, healthcare is universal so paid for with tax dollars. People aren’t selfish enough to further risk the lives of frontline staff."

However, there have been protests in South Korea against the shutdowns there, by churches that refused to observe them -- not anymore, though, because all protests have been forbidden there. So no, you won't see religious fanatics marching in the streets, but you will find them fighting with police sent to observe and enforce social-distancing in their services:

A video uploaded by a purported member of the church on YouTube showed a woman lying on the ground while another was heard shouting “Why are you doing this? Is this North Korea?”

South Korea is even more connected to the Internet than the US, and broadcasting or netcasting worship services is no less common.  Korea also has universal health care.

So does Israel, where ultraorthodox Israelis ignored shutdown orders, holding public funerals without masks or social distancing,

In Mea Shearim, video from Israel police showed officers showered with cries of "Nazis" and "murderers" as they made their way down the labyrinthine alleys of the insular Jerusalem neighborhood. A medical team from Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel's emergency response service, was pelted with rocks in the same neighborhood while trying to carry out a coronavirus test, a spokesman from MDA said.

(You may remember a previous occasion when the ultraorthodox protested against "Nazi" repression of their right to spit on eight-year-old girls and call them whores.)  Thousands rallied to protest against the shutdown from the left, and Netanyahu's government has relaxed restrictions somewhat.   And as in Korea and the US, the devout have found that their god doesn't protect them from the virus.

Some Islamists have also ignored warnings and congregated in large numbers, in Pakistan for example.  As of March 12 this year:

Pakistan has so far recorded 20 positive cases with zero fatalities while two people have recovered from the disease. But with its poor health infrastructure, the country has tested fewer people despite bordering China and Iran, where more than 90,000 cases were reported.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Super League, a nationwide cricket contest, is attracting tens of thousands of spectators to stadiums across the country of 210 million people.

Now, none of this has been obscure.  The connection between reactionary Korean Christianity and COVID-19 has been well-reported here, or so I thought.  CNN reported on the ultraorthodox rebellion too.  Why, then, were these fine, smart people so sure that only Americans were stupid enough to flout warnings and attack their government for trying to protect their health?  I suppose that in part they don't see themselves as belonging to the same America as the protesters here, a sentiment that's mutual.  But it takes self-imposed tunnel vision as disabling as the Right's to ignore well-known examples of jingoistic petulance outside the US, simply in order to preserve their own smug certainties and feelings of superiority.

Have You Stopped Endorsing Genocide? or, One Wants One's BBC

I admire Chomsky, but I admit he didn't answer this dishonest question (excerpted from this video) very well.  That's partly because it's constructed like "Have you stopped beating your wife?", beginning with a false premise.  Chomsky doesn't say that America is a terrible country: he freely admits that the US is a free country, perhaps the freest in the world.  It is rich, and of course many people have wanted to come here.  What he says is that America has done terrible things.

Perhaps one way to answer the question would be to ask why, since America is such a great country, it has done and continues to do such terrible things.  One might also ask what should be done to a country that does such terrible things.  Most Americans and American apologists have no doubt what should be done to other countries that commit crimes: sanctions, invasions, bombing, missile strikes, "regime change."  They have trouble coming up with plausible reasons why such measures should not be inflicted on the US.

But then, they don't need plausible reasons.  Like any good team players, they think that a loss by their team is a disaster.  Sometimes I'm surprised that sports fans are able to tolerate another team's daring to try to take the victory from their  guys at all.  They cultivate an inability to imagine sport, let alone the world, from another person's point of view.  Apologists for sport are mostly as dishonest about this as apologists for their country's violence.

Maybe an analogy or two will help.  Germany is the most civilized nation in the world.  People everywhere look up to it for its intellectual, cultural, and political accomplishments.  How can you call it barbaric, brutal, murderous for a few little missteps that any nation might have made?

Or: For almost two hundred years, millions of people have been inspired by communism to fight for the oppressed and downtrodden.  Sure, it isn't perfect, but if it's so terrible, why do so many people still -- even after the fall of the Soviet Union -- look to communism as humanity's best hope for a better world?

There are plenty of reasons why poor people, people in danger of their lives from religious or ethnic terrorism, people wanting to avoid conscription into the army, would have wanted to move to the United States despite its flaws.  One might be that they were more concerned with saving their own lives than with the harm the US did to others, and indeed might have figured that they were not likely to be the targets of US violence once they had immigrated.  European whites were not likely to be enslaved, or driven onto reservations.  Maybe they didn't care what happened to other people as long as they and their families were relatively safe.

Or maybe they had unrealistic ideas about the US.  Moving here often meant a fall in earnings and status, as many Europeans and (later) East Asians found to their consternation.  They were doctors or lawyers or other professionals in their home countries, but ended up working in sweatshops, running convenience stores, or driving taxis because their credentials weren't valid in the US, and their English wasn't good enough to acquire new credentials here.  But they couldn't go back, either because there was nowhere to go back to, or because they didn't want to lose face.  They may have borrowed money from relatives to make the move, and had to pay it back.  (Some did go back anyway, but they seem to have been the minority.)  But none of this has any bearing on the bad things that America has done.

It's understandable that people would not want to believe anything bad about a country or a person in whom they've invested all their love and admiration.  If that person, or that country, is proven to have done terrible things, they don't give up their adoration and allegiance lightly.  They blame the messenger, often harshly and hatefully.  It's understandable, but it's wrong, and should not be tolerated.  In the case of Stephen Sackur, the BBC interviewer here, it's not entirely clear whether he had even that excuse.  He's English, so he should be capable of some critical distance from America.  Maybe he thought he was playing the devil's advocate, giving Chomsky a chance to answer a charge that is commonly made against him.

In all this, it's ironic that many of the people who hate and lie about Chomsky, and about all critics of US foreign policy, nevertheless hate the US government and lie about it.  Recently a right-wing Christian with whom I went to high school posted on Facebook one of those absurd stories that many people love: a convoluted tale of a smart-aleck farmer who meets what turns out to be a rich city slicker from the US Congress, and tells him off (eviscerates him, destroys him, bam boom burn!).  It's a familiar theme, going back to the Eloquent Peasant stories of ancient Egypt, and persisting in the Marine Todd and That Student Was Albert Einstein urban myths of today.  It's very popular among people who are basically ignorant about ideas and the world.  Yet this guy and those who share such stories generally love a rich city slicker like Donald Trump, and even right-wing political and cultural figures who have enriched themselves at the public trough, and they are indignant if some radical liberal criticizes them.

That indignation is reciprocated by liberals who don't like it if some Rethug mocks rich city-slickers like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, whom they work very hard to see as Just Folks.  An attack on their idols is an attack on Regular Americans like themselves.  Despite the popularity of the term in lefty circles, I don't think "tribalism" is the right word for this pattern of thought.  Until I come up with a better one, though, it's important to keep challenging and trying to refute those who justify American (or any other country's) atrocities by minimizing them.

Our Coups Are Just Little Love Taps, Because Our Heart Is Pure

It looks like enough killjoys have been pointing out the US governments' fondness for interfering in other countries' elections, for overthrowing other countries' elected goverments and replacing them with brutal dictatorships, that some Democrats are starting to find it necessary to respond.  What I've seen so far has pretty much been along the lines of "Two wrongs don't make a right" and "People who've done wrong things have the right to complain when wrong things are done to them."  Sound enough principles, but these people are overlooking something important.

The US government generally, and Hillary Clinton in particular, does not consider it wrong to interfere in other countries' elections -- quite the contrary.  Therefore we aren't dealing with two wrongs here, if it turns out that Russia did intervene in the election; we're dealing with two rights, the prerogative of great powers.  The same applies to the second retort: can people complain when someone does to them the same thing they consider right when they do it to others?  What isn't acceptable is to change the rules when your own chickens come home to roost.

Many Democrats declared during the election campaign that anyone who failed to support Clinton with the requisite degree of devotion and adulation, let alone anyone who criticized her in any way, was aiding Trump and would be responsible for the terrible things that would happen if he became President.  They were not willing to accept responsibility for the terrible things that would happen if Clinton became President -- that would have nothing to do with them, they insisted (when they deigned to hear the argument at all), and besides Hillary wouldn't do anything terrrible, since she was a true progressive who would keep America great again!

I've never seen Democratic loyalists of this stripe really object to US interference in other countries' elections or government anyway (except, sometimes, when the President is a Republican), so I can't take seriously their sudden discovery that it's a bad thing. They were at most silent, and more often celebratory, when the US and its proxies overthrew elected governments.  So, like Clinton, they can't really claim that Russian interference in US elections would be a bad thing.  (I'm obviously leaving aside the question whether Russian intervention took  place, and if so whether it gave Trump the Electoral College victory; that too is open to doubt, but it's not my concern here.)  Barack Obama, to whom these considerations also apply, has occasionally admitted that in the remote past the US has been less than saintly in its dealings with smaller, weaker states, but he never let this admission interfere with continuing the tradition.  Of course this is just typical American exceptionalism: it's different when we do it, because we have good intentions.

(Why, yes -- I'm still procrastinating.)

Fair and Balanced

I was surprised to see a link on Facebook to a review of a new book by Noam Chomsky in the New York Review of Books.  Chomsky used to write regularly for the NYRB in the Sixties and early Seventies, but at some point he faded from their pages, and even his most serious political writings are rarely reviewed there, so this review is a nice gesture. It's not even the kind of transparent hatchet job that's typical of liberal media like the Guardian, the New York Times, or the Nation (which, I admit, has improved somewhat). The reviewer catches Chomsky in a minor error or two but on the whole concedes the validity of his "case against America." Still, I had to chuckle at this passage:

Yet Who Rules the World? is also an infuriating book because it is so partisan that it leaves the reader convinced not of his insights but of the need to hear the other side.

I know, right? Where could most American readers possibly "hear the other side"? If only a newspaper, or perhaps a TV network, or a politician or two would take up the defense of America's supreme goodness, so citizens could get get a fair and balanced view!

The Tribute Vice Pays to Virtue

A former co-worker of mine likes to post garbage on Facebook, alternating between moist devotional memes about God's goodness, celebrations of the Confederate battle rag, defenses of gun ownership, and attacks on Musims and liberals, especially President Obama.  I've given up trying to reason with her, and now simply attack her, though still in less vitriolic terms than the junk she posts.  She never replies -- in fact, like many people I know, she rarely writes anything herself, preferring to let the makers of memes do the talking -- but now and then someone else she knows replies to my comments, though he also relies on scattershot slogans and soundbytes.  He never actually addresses what I've said.  (It's the same tactic used by liberal Democrats when Obama is criticized, though they plug in different epithets.)

So, a few days ago this guy replied, "You sure like the beheading of children, don't you, Duncan?" to a comment I wrote on a meme celebrating the killing of Muslims by American snipers.  In a way, his riposte was successful, because I wasn't sure how to respond to it: What can you say to something that stupid?

What I don't get is what a right-wing American Christian patriot has against beheading: beheading was a traditional method of execution in the Christian West (not to mention the rest of the world) until the 18th and 19th centuries; the last time in Great Britain was in 1817; in France the guillotine was used until 1977.  Our good friends the Saudis still behead criminals.  True, beheading in the West has succumbed to political correctness -- we in America now prefer to kill people with botched lethal injections -- but my co-worker and her defender despise political correctness and favor the death penalty for those they believe deserve it.

The other form of violence that has American patriots righteously indignant is burning people alive, though again, I don't see why.  Executing people by burning is another traditional Christian practice.  The United States has never used it as an official method of execution, but unofficially it has been popular among tradition-minded white Christian Americans well into the twentieth century.  That's only here in America, of course.  The US pioneered the use of firebombing civilian populations in World War II, adding the use of napalm in Korea and Vietnam, and now burns people alive with Hellfire missiles fired from drones.  Teenagers who should have picked "far more responsible" parents, for example, but nine-year-old children too.

That little girl survived, unlike many beneficiaries of this well-intentioned but pitiful and helpless giant.

The accusation that critics of US violence "like" the atrocities of our enemies is a familiar one.  I'm not going to say that my co-worker and her buddy necessarily like the atrocities committed by our country, though probably they do in many cases, where the victims are black or brown or Muslim or otherwise safely Other.  Still, like most Americans they prefer not to know too many details, and to cheer for the horrors from a safe distance, getting indignant only when their grubby noses are rubbed in reality.  And in this they are no different from Obama fans, who don't want to be reminded of his crimes either.  Patriotism is the opiate of the people.

Life Is Cheap in the New World Order

There's been some revealing reaction to Rand Paul's filibuster against the nomination of John Brennan, and specifically his opposition to the use of surveillance drones in the US of A.  Even Roy Edroso tried to walk the line between opposing drones and supporting Rand Paul.  I left a derisive comment under that post, asking why he was endorsing Paul for President in 2016, because Edroso has never been willing to let anyone else walk that line.  When Glenn Greenwald argued last year that Ron Paul (that's Rand's daddy) made some good arguments against some of our bipartisan foreign policy, Edroso couldn't read that as anything but a blanket acceptance of all of Ron Paul's positions and an endorsement of Paul's candidacy.  When Greenwald "very graciously" corrected Edroso's misreading, Edroso still couldn't quite cope: "Jesus, Glenn, why not add 'Mwah hah hah' and 'Pathetic humans! Who can save you now?' while you're at it?"  In light of all that, it was really quite bold of Edroso to write, last Wednesday:

But Obama's a politician; that's his lookout, not mine. And while I think he's better than the regular run of postwar U.S. Presidents, "having his back" does not for me extend to countenancing the assassination of U.S. citizens.

By the end of the weekend, though, Edroso was back in Obama's pocket for all intents and purposes, with his weekly Village Voice compilation of rightblogger reaction to Rand Paul.  Comments at alicublog were predictable: Stoopid Stoopid Republicans!  It was up to Glenn Greenwald to sum up Democratic reaction to the whole mess.

But what interested me were the people who reacted to this whole story by saying something like "Aha!  You only care when Americans might be killed!  You never cared when it was just foreigners who were dying."  In some cases this is no doubt true, but in cases like Glenn Greenwald it's obviously false: he's been writing for years about the US killing dusky foreigners, by drones, cruise missiles or roving patrols of soldiers.  (A similar accusation was lodged against him for writing about the torture-by-solitary-confinement of Bradley Manning: Oh, you only care when a little white gay boy is being tortured, you don't care about all the many other prisoners in solitary confinement around the country.  But Greenwald had been writing about that issue, too, all along.)

And not only Greenwald has criticized the drone program: there are plenty of left critics of Obama's crimes, and most of them attacked Bush before him, when Bush was doing similar or the same things.  On the other hand, "the conservatives whom Democrats claim most to loathe - from Dick Cheney to John Yoo to Lindsey Graham to Peter King - have been so outspoken in their defense of Obama's actions in this area (and so critical of Paul): because the premises needed to justify Obama's policies are the very ones they so controversially pioneered."

Some people have argued, on the contrary, that it's only to be expected that a government should be more concerned about the safety of its citizens than about the safety of foreigners.  To some extent, given the world we live in, I can see this.  If you get into difficulties in another country, it's reasonable to head to the American Embassy first for help.  At most, though, this doesn't license my country to actively mistreat people who aren't Americans -- and that brings me full circle.  I'm not indifferent when my country treats foreigners' lives as disposable.

But here's the thing.  I'm perfectly willing to put Americans and foreigners on an equal footing; I just want to reverse the usual priority.  I'll agree not to care when Americans kill foreigners, but then I don't intend to care when anyone -- foreigners or our own Dear Leader -- decides to kill Americans.  I began to move in this direction when Americans would try to minimize American wartime atrocities by saying "War is hell, people get hurt, so shut up."  They weren't nearly as casual about American casualties, of course.  But I don't think you get to have it both ways: if we're in an unprecedented war against a new kind of enemy, and the whole world is a battlefield, there are no non-combatants, etc., then that applies to the US and its inhabitants too.

The Costs of Empire; or, Close But No SIGAR

Jim White doesn't draw any explicit conclusions in this post, but it makes me a bit nervous.  It's about the recently released audit report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR.

What SIGAR has found is that the massive investment that we have made in building military bases and training facilities is likely to be wasted because Afghanistan will be incapable of maintaining those bases after they have been handed over into Afghan control.

This follows up a post from last summer, on "the US counterinsurgency strategy that is based on the assumption that building a Western type of 'infrastructure' will produce an Afghan populace that develops such adulation for the purveyors of such cultural 'improvement' that they will immediately in fall in line with all other desires of the West."

The writers at emptywheel, where White writes, have done a lot of good writing about "green-on-blue" attacks, where Afghan security forces have attacked NATO forces.  (Just for snark's sake, notice the repeated typo in the headlines of this article from a distinguished UK publication.)  Aside from more recent parallels to Iraq, all this reminds me of similar concern during the US invasion of Vietnam: were the South Vietnamese troops ready to defend their nation against South Vietnamese communists, or would we have to stay there for another century or so to protect them?  Just for their own good, of course: the US has always been willing to spend blood and treasure protecting peasants and shepherds from those who would oppress them. We're just too good, you know?  This kind of rhetoric in mainstream media usually betrays a certain amount of racist contempt, with much more lurking below the surface, for the hapless wogs who can't even take responsibility for their role in the American imperium, despite all the devastation we've given them, and the billions of dollars we've spent through American contractors on "reconstruction."

So I'm always of two minds when I read stuff like this.  Part of me is properly contemptuous of the huge waste of money by the Bush-Obama regime for no good end.  But another part of me goes "Oh noes!  The invaders and occupiers are going to lose their massive investment!  Poor babies!" Though Schaedenfreude is in my DNA, I have to remind myself that whether I like it or not, the invaders and conquerers are primarily my own government and its minions in NATO.  Wheeler and her co-bloggers at emptywheel are not gung-ho fans of US aggression, so I know they know better.

But not everyone does.  Try this comment, the first one on White's post:

Not only have we wasted our fortunes, we have also extracted tremendous human costs, especially the attacks on UN troops by “loyal” afghan troops.

"Especially"?  Call me disloyal and uncaring, but I think the human cost inflicted on the Afghan people has been more "tremendous."  Would the commenter say the same thing about the human cost "extracted" on the Soviet troops who fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s?  While I sympathize with them as I sympathize with the American troops now, I think the suffering of the people whose homes were bombed and whose families were butchered by invading armies counts for more.  And if the American people are willing to back presidents who 'waste our fortunes' building military bases and armored embassy compounds, it's our lookout.  We can always vote the rascals out, after all.

But as always, it's about us, first foremost and only: it's only about us.

Ignorance Is Strength

Andrew Sullivan has struck again. According to FAIR, he told Chris Matthews a few nights ago:

SULLIVAN: Again, it just shows that America colonizes without any real colonial talent because this is a country built on escaping colonialism, not actually imposing it.
MATTHEWS: Yeah. Well…
SULLIVAN: You're doing something against the DNA of the United States.

We've been here before, of course. FAIR points to a similar statement, "America was not born as a colonial power," by someone supposedly smarter than Andrew Sullivan, namely the Only President We've Got. But I, and FAIR, are being somewhat unfair to Obama: there should be an ellipsis in that quotation, which FAIR took from the historian Roxanne Ortiz-Dunbar's rebuttal. According to the transcript of Obama's interview with Al-Arabiya in early 2009, Obama said:

But if you look at the track record, as you say, America was not born as a colonial power, and that the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, there's no reason why we can't restore that.

"As you say" refers to the interviewer's remark about the US, "It was the only Western power with no colonial legacy." That the US has a colonial legacy is not esoteric knowledge, aside from the fact that the US was born as a settler-colonial nation which promptly set out to claim and colonize much of North America from sea to shining sea. Even when we didn't move settlers into other countries, we set ourselves up as their rulers with the Monroe Doctrine, and ultimately installed and supported dictatorships in most of the Western hemisphere. We also built our empire by taking our competitors' possessions from them, though of course we couldn't let them go free or have anything like democracy because they weren't ready for it.

When Obama mentioned "the same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world," he meant not ordinary Muslims, but the dictatorships that ruled over them. That means not only the more obvious Arab tyrannies, but Indonesia's Suharto. "20 or 30 years ago" would have been the period of the Iranian revolution, which was notably lacking in respect for the country that overthrew Iran's elected government and installed a brutal dictatorship in its place; and US support for the settler state of Israel was winning us few friends outside of the palaces of the rulers. Obama inspired a brief wave of hope and optimism among the ordinary people of the world, it's true, until he showed his true colors by continuing and extending Bush's policies.

Sullivan is a notorious ignoramus; Obama really should know better. But I guess it's true what we hear about Americans' ignorance of history; the thing to notice is that this ignorance is shaped by American jingoist propaganda.

War Is Peace

Today was Martin Luther King Jr. day, and at least here in Bloomington, King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech of April 4, 1967 got its fair share of attention. The community radio station broadcast the entire speech on Alternative Radio this morning, and Bring It On, the African-American affairs program, referred to it. I've often quoted the part where King referred to the United States as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today," but I hadn't listened to or read the entire speech before, and I'm glad I finally did.

King presented an accurate account of US involvement in Vietnam, which I suspect would still be news to most Americans. For example:

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

But, as he said, King was just as concerned with American troops as with the Vietnamese:

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

He also addressed this earlier in the speech, in words that are still painfully relevant today.

Perhaps a more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

I don't know what King would say about our current President and our present wars if he were alive today. Some people online were sure he would be excoriating President Obama; I'm not so sure of that. King privately hated President Kennedy, and he wasn't terribly fond of President Johnson either; but publicly he was diplomatic. I don't know what he'd think of Obama, or what balance he'd find between satisfaction at the US electing a black President on the one hand, and disapproval of Obama's doing exactly what King had spoken against in 1967. (I admit, I'm sure that he would disapprove.)

What I do know is Obama's contempt for King. (Compare his praise of Ronald Reagan.) In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, he said:

As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their [King and Gandhi’s] examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.

And you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. Funny thing, though: I don't see King condemning defensive violence in his "Beyond Vietnam" speech, though he didn't exactly endorse it either. He recognized that the US was the aggressor, and that the Vietnamese were defending themselves against it. He hoped for a negotiated settlement, but he recognized that the Vietnamese had good reason to distrust the US, and that the US was the principal obstacle to peace in Vietnam.

The real trouble with Obama's remarks here is that his wars are not defending the US: they are wars of aggression. Nor do they protect us: they make the world less safe, giving people some very good reasons to want to attack us. His succeeding account of post-WWII American foreign policy is equally dishonest, though this line is entertaining: "To begin with, I believe that all nations -- strong and weak alike -- must adhere to standards that govern the use of force." Except for the United States, of course. If our wars were really "self-defense," I'd expect King to regard them as compassionately as he regarded the resistance of the Vietnamese.

In his Nobel speech Obama continued:

For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

There's more in the speech along the same lines. (Whatever It Is I'm Against It dissected it mercilessly.) So: could a non-violent movement halt American violence around the world? I don't know; nonviolent resistance in Iraq did pressure Bush into permitting elections there, but American forces are still there, though they've mostly been replaced with mercenaries. Obama's lack of awareness that his justification for military violence also justifies defensive violence against his regime is a sign of how out of touch with reality he had already become within a year in office, and he hasn't gotten any better since then.

Roy Edroso has a post at alicublog about rightbloggers who observe MLK Day (a day on ... not a day off!) by trying to prove that King was really a conservative and therefore The Blacks should vote Republican. Judging from his examples, their heart really isn't in it anymore. A commenter, Mr. Wonderful, observed that there's "something so sad and desperate about their endless efforts to 'prove' that X--a show, a star, a song, a movie, a new entree at Outback, a floor wax, a new chewing gum-- 'is really conservative.'" True dat, but is it any sadder than liberals' conviction that King was a liberal, or that Barack Obama is a progressive?

American Interests?

Glenn Greenwald has a good, if by-the-numbers piece on Obama's hypocrisy in condemning Iran for hypocrisy. It's good to have the quotations, but there's nothing really new in it; anyone who hasn't noticed Obama's hypocrisy either isn't paying attention, or doesn't want to see it.

Obligingly, an Obama apologist with the screen name JC Watts leapt into the fray. His rebuttal is also by-the-numbers, and it's worth looking at what he says for its incoherence as well as the way he regurgitates the familiar talking points.

The fact that Glenn is comfortable, no gleeful, in his assessment of false equivalence between President Obama and a Iranian theocracy, is stunning. But it shouldn't be. Glenn represents a type of liberalism that lost us every major election until Clinton. That allows chicken hawk republicans to call democratic war heroes cowards and get away with it. I have friend who believes in almost everything dems stand for and he still votes republican. Why? because when his dad came back from Vietnam dems spit on him. He can't get past it. Won't. Doesn't even try. Glenn is like those protesters.

Watts trips over his shoelaces in the first sentence, which on its face says that Greenwald was claiming a "false equivalence between President Obama and a Iranian theocracy." It's Watts who accuses Greenwald of declaring a "false equivalence" between Iran and the US -- "false equivalence" means that someone says two things are the same when they aren't. Greenwald was saying that the US and Iran claim to be different, but when it comes to a particular issue, namely supporting dictatorial states that kill their own people, they are more alike than different. So first off, Watts reveals that he doesn't know the terms he's using; he's probably parroting what he's heard from other loyalists. (Someone like the guy I discussed here, say.)

Second, which "democratic war heroes" does Watts have in mind? Not Obama; not Clinton. John Kerry was meant, I suppose, whose status as a hero is open to debate, as is that of the Republican "war hero" John McCain. Certainly George W. Bush had no war record to point to. Granted, attacking the Democrats as soft on Communism or terror is a popular Republican tactic, but the Democrats also use it when they can. But it's not at all obvious that Democratic presidential candidates have lost elections because of such accusations; it could be because of their economic policies, which they get from the Republicans. And what this has to do with Greenwald's criticism of Obama is far from clear. Again, Watts seems to have simply put together a word salad of Democratic talking points.

Third, Watts appeals to the right-wing urban legend of hippies spitting on returning Vietnam veterans. Hippies -- not "dems", unless they were wearing buttons "that said 'I AM A DEMOCRAT' to be sure he remembered which party spat on him". Several other commenters challenged Watts on the claim, which has never been documented and has been shown to be an urban legend, especially by Vietnam veteran Jerry Lembcke in his book The Spitting Image (NYU Press, 1998). Ironically it's Watts who accepts Republican propaganda on all these matters, and posits that the only way to resist it is to refrain from any criticism whatever of Democrats. (I don't believe that would work.)

Watts goes on:

We aren't Iran, we haven't been and won't be again. But there are no saints amoung state actors. There are nothing but murders and people acting in the interests of their nation. Before people ask whether killing Al- was in our interests I will point out that unlike many other places on earth, including Iran, we have elections to determine who makes that call. We select someone to represent us and our we have to live with the consequences of those choices.

First off, of course, Iran does "have elections to determine who makes that call." Iranian elections are as corrupt as American ones, of course, but they do have them. And Watts appears to be the person who doesn't want to "have to live with the consequences of those choices," not even to acknowledge the consequences.

The key to this paragraph, though, is the remark that "there are no saints among state actors. There are nothing but murders and people acting in the interests of their nation." This is generally what state apologists say when confronted with undeniable evidence of atrocities by their nation: States aren't moral actors. Ironically, people who point this out about our own state -- Noam Chomsky or Greenwald himself, for example -- will be denounced as America-hating terrorist-loving traitors. It's only acceptable to point it out in order to excuse American crimes.

Greenwald replied to Watts, who countered that he was complaining that

your entire discourse, and I include here not simply this post but your continued hectoring of the President, is based on a first principle that the US government's role is to act morally or humanistically. It isn't. Why would it be? The obligation of nationhood is self propagation. They are neither moral nor immoral they are amoral, with their own interests as the only controlling factor.

Greenwald replied:

This is absolutely not my principle at all, let alone my "first principle."
If American political and media elites admitted that the country acts in its self-interest just like every other country, then I'd stop objecting to the constant stream of propaganda and deceit about America's moral superiority and exceptionalism. It's precisely because America does operate by self-interest like every other country - albeit with more aggression and violence -- that I find the propaganda so harmful.

Taken as a principle, though, this means that Watts can't consistently criticize the government of Iran, or Syria, or any other official enemy according to Obama. (Of course he doesn't care about consistency: defending the right of the United States and its god-king is all that matters.) You can't consistently attack other states for immorality and then defend your own state by saying that states are "amoral, with their own interests as the only controlling factor." (It would be more accurate to say that it is elites' interests, not those of the general population, that are the controlling factor, but who needs accuracy when you're defending a beleaguered President?) But this sort of waffling is common if not universal in nationalist propaganda.

Under questioning by other commenters, Watts naturally insisted that he didn't mean to say that Greenwald couldn't criticize Obama, but not very convincingly. Like so many Americans, he trumpeted American freedom of dissent compared to countries like Iran, but is hostile to any American who actually exercises that freedom. To criticize a Democrat, anyway.

Watts finally (so far) addressed Greenwald:

You are tilting at windmills or swinging at phantoms. Let me assure you Pols aren't coming with the customers. There are hoops you have to jump through in order to be elected in this country, in any country. Propaganda is one of them. Saying you believe in "American Exceptionalism," is like wearing a flag pin, or going to church, synagogue or mosque. Ubiquitous and necessary but not demonstrative of conviction.

And so on. Once again he undercut himself here, as so many Obamaristas do, for if "there are hoops you have to jump through to be elected in this country", then he can't criticize Republicans either. He also tacitly or unconsciously admitted that the real Obama (as opposed to the sweet-talking campaigner) is a hypocritical murderous thug. Not quite what he hoped to achieve, I daresay.

The Salon comment system is going haywire again (though obviously not for all the other people), or I might have put most of this in comments there. But it might be convenient to have this fine example of Obama apologetics collected in one place here.

His Eye Is on the Cruise Missile

Glenn Greenwald, who's been posing some good questions about Obama's Libya speech as a revelation of his (that is, Obama's) belief in American exceptionalism, linked today to a recent post by Andrew Sullivan, calling it "long and thoughtful." Well, he was half-right. It's about as thoughtful as most of Sullivan's writing, which is not very.

Sullivan is sure that the US-led attack on Libya is a good thing:

In this, especially with this Libya clusterfuck, Obama reverted to embracing the forces he was elected to resist and restrain. One appreciates the difficulty of this and the horrible moral dilemma of Benghazi; and I still hope for success - because I see no sane alternative to Obama anywhere and no one can hope that the monster Qaddafi stays in power.

"The monster Qaddafi." Well, yes, Qaddafi is a very bad man. That's been well-known for a long time, which raises the question of why the US, England, and other European countries decided to rehabilitate him. That began during the Bush administration, but did the Obama administration do anything to stop it? Before now, I mean? Nope: several people have pointed out John McCain's junket to Libya in 2009, which McCain himself has conveniently forgotten:

In August 2009 he led a delegation of senators, including fellow hawks Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman, on a trip to visit the Libyan leader in Tripoli. Discussed during the visit was delivery of — get this — American military equipment to Gadhafi (a man with American blood on his hands no less).

“We discussed the possibility of moving ahead with the provision of non-lethal defense equipment to the government of Libya,” the AP quoted McCain as saying at a press conference. McCain also noted that “ties between the United States and Libya have taken a remarkable and positive turn in recent years.”

One can also ask whether firing cruise missiles into Libya is the best or only way to protect civilians. And have you heard that Secretary of State Clinton told Congress that Obama would ignore any Congressional war resolutions restraining US military action in Libya as "an unconstitutional encroachment on executive power"? Well, now you have.

But back to Sullivan and American exceptionalism. First he admits:

But, of course, that [i.e., this] land mass was available so easily because of the intended and unintended genocide of those who already lived there - which takes the edge off the divine bit, don't you think? Call me crazy (and they do) but my concept of God does not allow for God's blessing of genocide as a means for one country's hegemony over the earth.

I'm not going to call him crazy, just ignorant. The Roman Catholic Sullivan's concept of God doesn't square with Biblical conceptions, which show "God's blessing of genocide" in the conquest of the Promised Land by his Chosen People. And "that land mass" became available to the US not only through the elimination of the indigenous people, but through conquest of other countries established by rival European powers, especially Spain. Much of the southwestern US was simply taken from Mexico by war.

He goes on (and on):

This is not to say that America doesn't remain, by virtue of its astonishing Constitution, a unique sanctuary for human freedom. We are freer here in terms of speech than in most other advanced countries, cowed by p.c. laws and restrictions. We are freer here in labor and capital than most other countries. To feel pride in this is natural. It is why I love this place and yearn to be one of its citizens. And the vast wealth of an entire continent, unleashed by freedom's flourishing, gave this land of liberty real and awesome global power, which it used to vanquish the two great evils of the last century - Nazism and Communism. This is the noble legacy so many now seek to perpetuate, with good intentions and benign hearts, despite the disastrous and costly interventions of the last decade.

"The vast wealth of an entire continent" was not "unleashed by freedom's flourishing" -- as Sullivan admits, it was unleashed by stealing it from the people who already lived here. The history of American capitalism isn't pretty, and it's ill-timed of Sullivan to prattle about US "freedom in labor and capital" on the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and as anti-labor forces are rampant. Even granting that World War II was "noble", and not everyone would, it was the exception rather than the rule. Before that war, the US had a nasty record in the Western hemisphere and elsewhere. After the war, the US usually fought Communism by stomping on liberty, replacing elected governments with brutal dictatorships, which our propaganda called "the Free World." Even where the repression we supported was not quite as harsh, we demanded economic policies that took a heavy toll in human life and health.

But Sullivan has always been patriotically ill-informed, like so much of the Right, and ready to vilify anyone else who criticizes US foreign policy. He can bitch about Sarah Palin all he wants, but he helped pave the way for her, Michelle Bachmann, and other professional ignoramuses.

American Exceptionalism -- The More It Changes ...

I'm reading Bruce Cumings's The Korean War: A History (The Modern Library, 2010), and will probably have some more to say about it as I go along. (If I don't get even further behind in my writing than I am already, that is.)

For now, though, I'm struck by the enduring inability of many educated Americans -- not what my RWA1 calls the "yahoos," but, y'know, real people! -- to recognize that people in other countries have interests of their own, just like we do. Cumings quotes several appalling bits from "the respected military editor of The New York Times, Hanson Baldwin," writing during the war.

Somewhat uncomfortable with North Korean indignation about "women and children slain by American bombs," Baldwin went on to say that Koreans must understand that "we do not come merely to bring devastation." Americans must convince "these simple, primitive, and barbaric peoples ... that we -- not the Communists -- are their friends." Now hear the chief counsel for war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials, Telford Taylor:

The traditions and practices of warfare in the Orient are not identical with those that have developed in the Occident ... individual lives are not valued so highly in Eastern mores. And it is totally unrealistic of us to expect the individual Korean soldier ... to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare [26].

Bear in mind, first, that when Taylor wrote of "the individual Korean soldier", he meant the individual South Korean soldier more than the individual North soldier. I doubt he meant to exculpate the brutal Commies of their atrocities on the grounds that it was unrealistic to expect them to "follow our most elevated precepts of warfare."

Second, it was not the Koreans but the Americans who leveled the North at Douglas MacArthur's orders. "Soon George Barrett of The New York Times found 'a macabre tribute to the totality of modern war' in a village north of Anyang" [30], in a scene that echoes Pompeii, maybe intentionally:

The inhabitants through throughout the village and in the fields were caught and killed and kept the exact postures they held when the napalm struck -- a man about to get on his bicycle, fifty boys and girls playing in an orphanage, a housewife strangely unmarked, holding in her hand a page torn from a Sears-Roebuck catalogue crayoned at Mail Order No. 3,811,294 for a $2.98 "betwitching bed jacket -- coral."

"Secretary of State Dean Acheson wanted censorship authorities notified about this kind of 'sensationalist reporting,' so it could be stopped."

But you know, Americans consider life cheap, as long as it's not American life. Individual lives are not valued so highly in American mores. As a result we can hardly expect the individual American soldier to follow our most elevated precepts of warfare ... You could transpose so much of these stories into contemporary Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, and they'd fit all too well.

When Corruption Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Corrupt

(image)

We hear a lot about how corrupt Hamid Karzai's government is, and I imagine much of it is true: Karzai is, after all, our creature, our man in Kabul. Almost by definition, a leader installed by invaders is going to be corrupt. If the US had thought Karzai would have too much of a mind of his own, we'd have looked for someone else. It's also useful that such a person should be at least somewhat dirty, so we'll have an excuse for taking him down (or letting him fall) when we choose to do so.

So, when Democracy Now reported this morning that

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has ordered an investigation into a recent NATO air strike that reportedly killed as many as fifty-two civilians, including women and children. Karzai called on NATO troops to "put into practice every possible measure to avoid harming civilians during military operations." Afghan officials say the civilians died when a NATO helicopter gunship opened fire on a compound where they had taken shelter after fleeing an expected firefight between Taliban fighters and NATO troops. US military officials have rejected the claims of the Afghan government, saying there is no evidence civilians were injured or killed.

I had to snicker derisively. The US denial is of course tantamount to an admission of guilt, since the US military always lies about its atrocities. (So does every military and every government, of course, but there's all this American Exceptionalism around.)

The same thing goes for the Obama administrations's efforts to downplay this weekend's release by Wikileaks of a huge batch of documents about the US war in Afghanistan, which "provide a devastating portrait of the war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, how a secret black ops special forces unit hunts down targets for assassination or detention without trial, how Taliban attacks have soared, and how Pakistan is fueling the insurgency." The White House first complained that this was a threat to US security, citing a "potential national security concern" and then declaring that "there’s no broad new revelations in this". All quite familiar. (It's not just the White House, of course. The AP reports that Senator Jane Harman, D-CA, claimed (via) that "Someone inadvertently or on purpose gave the Taliban its new 'enemies list.'" That's a lie, since no one in the US government could have vetted all the material in the time before Harman's remark, and the newspapers which reported on it collaborated with the White House to remove identifying details. Not that I could get all that excited if it were true, since those collaborators provide the US with information for our atrocities.)

(P.S. July 28: The London Times claims that it found identifying details in the documents; Julian Assange of Wikileaks denies it; "Robert Riegle, a former senior intelligence officer, said: "'It's possible that someone could get killed in the next few days.'" Of course, people are getting killed in Afghanistan all the time, often by US troops or predator drones using intelligence given by Afghan informants.)

Amy Goodman's interview with Guardian editor editor David Leigh shows another familiar pattern: the White House worried that the released material would endanger Afghan collaborators, people who had worked with the US. But as Leigh says,

Well, I’ll say it again: we had already decided, on Spiegel, on the New York Times and on The Guardian, what we were going to do, and we were going to take out names that we thought might be in danger of reprisals. And we decided not to publish certain intelligence reports that describe that kind of thing. So all those decisions had been taken. So the White House was pushing at an open door when it said, "We don’t want people to be in danger." So they’re not—they’re congratulating us for something we had already decided to do.

As Glenn Greenwald says, "Yes, leaking classified information is against the law - so is improperly classifying evidence of crimes or other wrongdoing" (via).

But best of all was DN's report of an appearance by former hacker Adrian Lamo, who'd turned in Bradley Manning, the alleged whistleblower for Wikileaks' earlier release of the video of a US massacre in Iraq. Lamo spoke at a Hackers on Planet Earth conference and got a rough reception:

ADRIAN LAMO: I think that the government behaved themselves better than a lot of people would give them credit for. To set the record clear, I am not an informant. I’m a witness in a criminal case. It’s not that different, in my eyes, from being a witness in any other case that could involve potential loss of life.


EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN: Adrian, I mean, you say it’s—you know, it’s been a pleasant experience for you, you know, working with the government on this, I guess. But Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker, is currently sitting in prison in Kuwait, I believe, and he could be locked up for the rest of his life. How do you feel about that?


AUDIENCE MEMBER: Tortured!


ADRIAN LAMO: I think that it’s a little bit ludicrous to say that Bradley Manning is going to be tortured. We don’t do that to our citizens.


AUDIENCE MEMBER: Guantánamo!


ADRIAN LAMO: I mean, obviously it’s been much worse for him, but it’s certainly been no picnic for me. And I knew from the get-go that it was going to be a low point in my interactions with the community. And I—


UNIDENTIFIED: Yet you could have ignored him. When he first contacted you, you were not obliged to ever answer him. You could have simply ignored him, and none of this would have ever happened.


ADRIAN LAMO: And Mr. Manning could have ignored the diplomatic cables, and he could have ignored the collateral murder video, but he followed his conscience, as I did mine.


AUDIENCE MEMBER: From my perspective, I see what you have done as treason.

It's best if you watch the clip and hear it for yourself, though. When I listened, I echoed the audience response to Lamo's claim that the US doesn't torture its citizens: