What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?

I was just reading the superlative new book by Chris Hedges, Death of the Liberal Class, which I highly recommend. The second chapter, "Permanent War", focuses on the corrosive effects of the war in Afghanistan. In his long career, Hedges has reported on numerous conflicts around the globe. He previously discussed the indescribable brutality of war - and the disturbing fascination it holds - in his book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, but reading this new chapter brought it all back home for me again, not least because he describes an environment in which one of my family members is currently serving.

Here are the key passages:

We currently spend some $4 billion a month on Afghanistan. But we are unable to pay for whiteboards and markers for instructors. Afghan soldiers lack winter jackets. Kabul is still in ruins. Unemployment is estimated at about forty percent. And Afghanistan is one of the most food-insecure countries on the planet.

What are we doing? Where is this money going?

Look to the civilian contractors. These contractors dominate the lucrative jobs in Afghanistan. The American military, along with the A[fghan] N[ational] A[rmy], is considered a poor relation. And war, after all, is primarily a business.

[...]

"What good are a quarter-million well-trained Afghan troops to a nation slipping into famine?" the officer asked. "What purpose does a strong military serve with a corrupt and inept government in place? What hope do we have for peace if the best jobs for the Afghans involve working for the military? What is the point of getting rid of the Taliban if it means killing civilians with airstrikes and supporting a government of misogynist warlords and criminals?

"We as Americans do not help the Afghans by sending in more troops, by increasing military spending, by adding chaos to disorder," he said. "What little help we do provide is not useful in the short term and is clearly unsustainable in the face of our own economic crisis. In the end, no one benefits from this war, not America, not Afghans. Only the CEOs and executive officers of war-profiteering corporations find satisfactory returns on their investments."

That great American truth-teller, Major General Smedley Butler, famously described his long and illustrious military career in the following terms: "I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism." War is a racket. As Hedges illustrates, for those who rake in obscene amounts of cash from it, the war in Afghanistan is an end in itself.

Let's try a little thought experiment. What would happen if the war were to end tomorrow? While such an unlikely scenario would be a supremely moral decision and a general boon for humanity (despite the tremendous costs in human life, we would at least stop the bloodletting), for the corporations that profit the most from America's imperial wars -the Blackwaters (now Xe), the KPRs, the Halliburtons - it would be an unmitigated disaster. These companies depend on endless war and attendant government subsidies to fatten their bottom lines. As befits an amoral institution seeking one thing and one thing only - profit - the corporation is immune to all details of real human suffering.

The media and entertainment industries continue to present a sanitized, mythical-heroic vision of war that has nothing in common with war itself. I made the mistake of reading the letters section of the National Post today and saw the usual bromides about how Canada is liberating the women of Afghanistan and helping spread democracy. Hedges reminds us that no one could repeat those thought-terminating propaganda lines if they were standing over the shrapnel-filled bodies of slain Afghan children while devastated parents helplessly scream and cry. The next time you want to justify this criminal enterprise by spouting off ridiculous clichés about "finishing the job" and "fighting terror", look at the picture below and tell me that it's worth it:

One of the central themes of Death of the Liberal Class is how the expansion of the corporate state was facilitated and exacerbated by traditional liberal institutions which utterly failed to defend the ideals they claimed to uphold. The media, the church, universities, liberal politicians, artists and labour unions were all bought off with corporate money and in doing so lost any legitimacy they had previously claimed as the moral conscience of the nation. A series of anticommunist purges decimated the American intelligentsia and left an intellectual vacuum that has rendered certain ideas - such as class struggle - effectively unthinkable in mainstream discourse. Liberal thinkers such as Michael Ignatieff became apologists for the warmongers and torturers under the veneer of "humanitarian intervention".

The demise of the liberal class as a progressive force may have begun with its steady abandonment of the class consciousness which had inspired 1930s radicals and its replacement by identity politics, which - far from uniting oppressed social groups - actually divided them by race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The shedding of Marxist theory proved disastrous over ensuing decades, as the long postwar economic boom ground to a halt and political leaders responded with a more nakedly aggressive capitalism. Deregulation, the resort to expanded credit and financialization of the economy coincided with industry's cannibalization of the workforce through union-busting, wage cuts and outsourcing. Liberals, having abandoned the language of class struggle in favour of anticommunist orthodoxy, utterly failed to resist.

It's tempting to dismiss the 60s counterculture as a mere trend, a fashion made by and for privileged baby boomers. The 1930s radicals struggled against the capitalist state without shame of addressing their oppressor by its true name. In the incomparably more desperate conditions of the Great Depression, socialists and communists had worked with union organizers to combat the brutal laissez-faire philosophy of the day and agitate for improved working conditions, which laid the basis for the modern social welfare state. The children of the 60s, by contrast, lived in relative material comfort. The 1970s witnessed a steady backlash against the countercultural ethos which culminated in the conservatism of the 1980s - the embrace of business values, jingoistic patriotism and conservative cultural denominators like religion and "family values". Sadly, that cultural backlash has lasted to the present day, embodied by ever-present greed, increased religiosity and the veneration of militarism. As much as I adore South Park, its episode "Die Hippie Die" summarizes the fashionable mockery of 60s idealism.

But whatever the faults of the countercultural generation, and the irritating fetishization of that period in boomer-targeted films, it has to be said that the basic values they advocated were miles ahead of what passes for youth rebellion today (if it exists at all). Say what you will about naivete; the younger generation in the 1960s spearheaded a widespread, vigorous, and determined antiwar movement. The degree of passion and organizational verve deployed against the war in Vietnam is something that we need to examine in detail today, when we have twice as many imperial wars of aggression but a fraction of the opposition. While resistance to the war in Vietnam may have been based on essentially self-interested motives - specifically, a military draft that rendered many of these radical youths eligible for combat duty - antiwar groups nevertheless expressed their opposition on a scale almost unimaginable today.

What is so funny about peace, love and understanding? The prevailing values of the 60s are widely mocked today, but the hippies had their hearts in the right place. Radicals of the 1930s and 1960s, whatever the difference in material conditions, had one thing in common: a faith in the ability of humanity to overcome its problems and create a better world. Of course, there was something of a difference in the tactics of the hippies and the more politically-active "yippies": where the former advocated dropping out of mainstream society in favour of a counterculture dominated by sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, the latter urged real political confrontation with the powers-that-be. My personal bias would be in favour of a union of those two approaches, because as much as I aspire to create real political change...sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll are three of my favourite things.

The point is that, whether you thought them naive or not, 60s youth fought for their ideals and values. In the decades since, we've seen an increasing youthful nihilism which may have started as soon as Charles Manson and the Rolling Stones' infamous Altamont festival revealed the dark underbelly of the Woodstock generation. Race riots reversed some of the goodwill generated in the white majority by Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Act, while elites capitalized on the proliferation of inner-city crime to blame "lazy" welfare recipients. It's no wonder the 1980s witnessed a conservative backlash.

But the increasing outspokenness of the "Silent Majority" was paralleled by a decrease in youthful activism. Generation X, decisively embodied by the 90s grunge phenomenon, became identified with a generalized apathy supplanted with heavy doses of irony. Mark Ames summarized that disdain for earnestness in his account of the recent Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally, which may have been the best account yet of the ideological vacuum among today's youth. Denied any concrete ideological alternative to rampant corporatism, the young embrace an "above-it-all" ironic distance that effectively cedes the debate to those who give a damn, no matter how far those individuals are comparatively removed from reality. Hence the Tea Party.

The American ruling class has been able to get away with as much as it has because it knows it faces no real mass opposition. This explains why Barack Obama has been able to break almost every one of his campaign promises, except for those - such as escalating the war in Afghanistan - enthusiastically backed by the elites. While Obama is, like most U.S. politicians, a self-serving charlatan and corporate whore, he had one thing right when he said real change comes from the bottom up. The notion that "Change" could come from electing a single politician from either of the two Big Business parties was always a ludicrous notion, but I have high hopes that the American Left is finally waking from their slumber and realizing the enormity of the task before them. Still the world's only superpower, the working class of the United States has a special role to play in the global class struggle.

In solidarity with our American class brothers and sisters, the Canadian proletariat has a duty to challenge the dominance of business interests over the levers of government. But only a vibrant youth component can provide the necessary energy to light a fire under the working class movement. We need to take the best qualities of the 1930s and 1960s radicals and unite them in a 21st century movement that will fight the corporate rape of this planet and its people. As my resident revolutionary cadre, Fightback attempts to influence the existing system by pushing for the adoption of socialist values by the NDP, but we should have no illusions as to the capacity of an establishment political party to fight for the values we hold dear. We will oppose imperialism in Afghanistan, G20-mandated austerity policies, environmental degradation, privatization of public services, and all manifestations of the class war conducted by the wealthy against the working class. And we will do it with or without the NDP.

Paradoxically, lasting peace is impossible without a fight. Since the G20, the ruling elite has made clear it will not tolerate opposition to its class warfare without resorting to outright repression. While we aim to mobilize the working class on the basis of a coherent socialist philosophy that exerted such an influence on the struggles of the 1930s (as Lenin said, "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement"), we should take all possible lessons from the 1960s counterculture, which imprinted itself on the mainstream in no small part due to its cultural significance. A union of artists and political activists can only help the movement, since the greatest art generally has a didactic quality to it.

We must overcome the fragmentation of the population wrought by the proliferation of musical subgenres and dissipation of mass culture facilitated by cable/satellite television and the rise of the internet. Such a task can only be accomplished by focusing (per the advice of James P. Cannon) on the key issues that unite us. According to recent polls, 60 per cent of Canadians oppose the mission in Afghanistan while a bare 37 per cent support it. To put it another way, a clear majority of the population sides with the antiwar perspective, a fact easily forgotten in the face of a media apparatus that deems criticism of the war in Afghanistan a fringe viewpoint. In the face of such evidence - and the utterly antidemocratic decision of Harper's Conservatives and the Liberals to extend the mission to 2014 without a word of parliamentary debate - progressive forces should capitalize on widespread antiwar sentiment as the battering ram of a broader assault on the "values" and priorities of the corporate state.

The war in Afghanistan was not even brought up in the American 2010 midterm elections because the Republican and Democratic parties are equally in thrall to the military-industrial complex. We see the Canadian parallel in the agreement of the Liberals and Conservatives to extend the war for three years without any debate in Parliament. You want to support the troops? Work for what the troops actually want: a ticket home. End the war in Afghanistan.

UPDATE: As of today, NATO's war in Afghanistan has officially lasted longer than the Soviet one. Will the other Cold War superpower likewise meet its demise in the graveyard of empires?

More War! If They Want It

Can't really say it any better than this guy here. "Our" government has just decided on three more years of war and it isn't even debated in Parliament, supposedly the people's central deliberative council. A more direct refutation of bourgeois democracy I can't imagine. I wouldn't expect anything less from Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff, but Bob Rae's disgusting display makes me even more bewildered as to how he ever became leader of the NDP. Rae's entire political career has been little more than a warning to future generations of idealists.

A very close relative of mine is currently deployed in Afghanistan for a one-year mission. The idea that the war would be ending in 2011, near the end of his deployment, had helped blunt more blatant antiwar sentiment on my part. But the sneaky, deceitful way this war has been extended without any deliberation by the people's main legislative body (a farce to think of it that way, I know, but I'm just humouring popular Canadian mythology here) is a devastating indictment of any claim we might have to be a "democracy". I might level a lot of criticism at the NDP leadership, but in this case Jack Layton is absolutely right. While I would prefer that he advance the possibility of total withdrawal immediately, the fact that arguing for this to be debated in Parliament comes across as a radical "protest" point of view is a damning critique of our entire political system.

When the majority of a nation's people do not support a war, and that nation's government continues to prosecute that war against the will of the population, you cannot credibly claim to be a democracy. "Democracy" = "rule of the people". Good one.

Jon Elmer slams Canadian policy on Israel-Palestine

Originally posted at Kingstonist.com.

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”
– Paulo Freire

Canadian politicians have their knickers in a twist over Israeli Apartheid Week.

Ontario MPPs of all parties voted to condemn the international campus event, decrying its organizers for their so-called “hate speech”. Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff released an official statement of condemnation in which he claimed that “the activities planned for the week will single out Jewish and Israeli students. They will be made to feel ostracized and even physically threatened in the very place where freedom should be paramount — on a university campus.”

Disingenously, he added that “criticism of Israeli government policy is legitimate,” while “wholesale condemnation of the State of Israel and the Jewish people is not legitimate. Not now, not ever.”

Iggy’s argument would surely surprise many of the Jews who attended IAW events at Queen’s this week. Now in its sixth year, Israeli Apartheid Week is an annual series of events held in cities and campuses around the globe to educate people on the nature of Israeli apartheid and its brutal military occupation of Palestine. The use of the word “apartheid” draws deliberate parallels to the racist 20^th century South African regime, and the minds behind IAW aim to put similar pressure on the Israeli government by launching Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns worldwide.

The 2010 Israeli Apartheid Week in Kingston was organized by the group Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights. Events from Monday to Wednesday at Queen’s included lectures on “Transnational Popular Resistance for Palestine”, “Israeli Apartheid: What’s in a Name”, “The Politics of Divestment: Darfur vs. Israel”, and “The Politics of Local and International Solidarity in Palestine”. On Friday, the Artel hosted the film Slingshot Hip-Hop, a documentary about Palestinian rap music.

On Thursday night, Canadian freelance journalist Jon Elmer spoke at Macintosh-Corry Hall to a diverse audience and put the spotlight on Canada’s support for Israeli apartheid with his presentation “Ghetto Palestine: Canadian Foreign Policy and the Future of the Israel/Palestine conflict.”

Elmer is a veteran reporter who has long focused on the Middle East, reporting from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip during the al-Aqsa Intifada (2003), after Israel’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip (2005), and during the sanctions period and resultant internal strife (2007). His work has appeared on Al-Jazeera, and he has covered globalization summits and accompanying protests throughout North America.

Elmer held the audience’s attention well past the two and a half hour time limit. He had the refreshing veneer of an unrepentant leftist, willing to go beyond the “safe zone” of conventional wisdom in his denunciation of Canada’s imperialist foreign policy. He challenged NDP candidate Daniel Beals on his party’s lukewarm support for the Palestinian cause and its acquiescence to the Queen’s Park motion condemning Israeli Apartheid Week, as well as chastising the federal NDP for failing on more than three occasions to end Canadian military involvement in Afghanistan.

Beals, for his part, acknowledged a gulf between regional NDP supporters and party leaders, who tend to be more conservative than grassroots activists. He also said there was a constant intra-party debate on the issue of Israel-Palestine among Jewish NDP members.

Elmer’s presentation was densely-packed with information that could be divided into two broad sections. In the first part, he explained the nature of Israeli apartheid and the worldwide movement against it through the BDS strategy. In the second part, he explained Canada’s role supporting Israel in what the Goldstone Report described as possible “crimes against humanity”.

Named after UN Human Rights Council president Richard Goldstone – an internationally respected South African jurist and ardent Zionist – the report unequivocally stated that Israel committed war crimes during its 2008-9 attack on the Gaza Strip through collective punishment of Palestinian civilians and the use of white phosphorus in densely-populated areas (the report also accused Palestinian militants of war crimes for their deliberate targeting of Israeli civilians via rockets and mortars).

The Herzliya Conference, sponsored by Israeli think tank the Institute for Policy and Strategy, is the most prominent stage for the articulation of national policy by Israel’s political leaders. Its most recent report talked about the “delegitimization” of Israel on the world stage following the publication of the Goldstone Report. Israel also believes that the BDS campaign represents a “strategic threat that could become an existential threat” to the Jewish state.

The term “apartheid”, Elmer stressed, was central to simplifying the terms of the debate. The BDS tactic helped end South African apartheid after 40 years, even as many Western countries continued to support the racist government there. The terms of the debate were similar; Nelson Mandela, like Palestinians who resist the Israeli occupation, was also called a “terrorist”.

Ironically, given the controversy surrounding the term “apartheid”, the term was recently used by none other than Israel’s hawkish defence minister Ehud Barak in arguing that Israel’s security would be better served by a peace agreement with the Palestinians. “As long as in this territory west of the Jordan River there is only one political entity called Israel,” said Barak, “it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic.

“If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state.”

Explaining the pro-Israel consensus of the Canadian political establishment, Elmer suggested that, as with Canada’s war in Afghanistan, foreign policy towards Israel was based less on tangible material resources or imperial conquest and more on the abstract idea of gaining “a seat at the table” in international discussions.

“You can’t really underestimate a seat at the table,” said Elmer. “When important world decisions are made, if you lay your blood and treasure on the line, particularly in service of American political objectives, you’re going to have a seat at that table and you’re going to be able to participate when contracts are given out or political influence is given out. And sometimes you don’t get direct political influence over the territory upon which you are intervening.

“I think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most visible, longest-running, most politically-significant conflicts in the world. Whether that’s just or not is a different story, but it’s a reality, and for Canada to participate in that is seen as strategically important to Canadian interests.”

Canada currently has expeditionary forces deployed in 18 different countries. As Elmer pointed out, these are not all declared combat missions, but often include military “advisors” or attempts to influence elections – traditionally the preserve of CIA-style covert operations, but now openly funded by Western think tanks such as the National Endowment for Democracy, which aim to set up economically compliant pro-Western governments.

The Canadian foreign policy establishment’s cynical attitude towards “democracy” in Palestine was put on display for the world to see after U.S. President George W. Bush pushed for an election there in 2006. When the results handed a resounding victory to Hamas, rather than the pro-Western Fatah, Canada became the first country not to recognize the new government. As Defence Minister Peter MacKay said in a revealing statement, “We can’t be said to be following the Americans if we pre-empt them.”

Following the election, members of Fatah, with American and Israeli support, attempted to stage a coup by ousting members of Hamas from the government (detailed in David Rose’s Vanity Fair article “The Gaza Bombshell”). Hamas regained control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, yet this defence of a democratically-elected government was itself referred to in mainstream Western media as a “coup”.

Canada has since supported prospective Palestinian strongman Salam Fayyad as the head of an “independent” government backed by Israel and the West. With an American education in economics and a tenure at the International Monetary Fund, Fayyad is the preferred vehicle for a neoliberal transformation of Palestine. Elmer compared him unfavourably to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, in that while both are Western puppets, Karzai at least has an Afghan constituency. Fayyad receives $2 billion in funding annually from Canada, the United States and Europe, and the Canadian International Development Agency has lavishly funded a security force that may have been complicit in vast human rights abuses.

Israeli Foreign Minister and protofascist Avigdor Lieberman, who has suggested requiring Israeli Arabs to take a loyalty oath, has declared that Israel “needs more allies” like Canada. Indeed, this country’s unquestioning support of Israel may now even exceed that of the United States. Elmer posited three recent political decisions that help explain Israel’s embrace of the Great White North.

Firstly, Canada backed the postponement of a ceasefire during the 2006 war in Lebanon, allowing Israel to complete its devastation of the country. Secondly, the country has blockaded Hamas and refuses to accept the legitimacy of the 2006 Palestinian elections that swept the Islamist party to power. Finally, Canada has been “at the vanguard” in the isolation of Iran – a country which has not attacked any of its neighbours for centuries and has no nuclear weapons, while Israel regularly utilizes military force internally and externally and has an undeclared stockpile of hundreds of nuclear weapons.

Elmer warned about the consequences of Canada’s blind support for a militaristic Israel that flouts international law.

“The political implications of Canada being allied with Israel this closely are legally clear,” said Elmer. “If Canada is bragging about supporting a security force that’s carrying out widespread human rights abuses, legally in international law before the International Criminal Court, Canada is participating in war crimes.

“If people fund African rebels, the whole world thinks it’s obvious that that’s a war crime,” he continued. “But when we support Palestinian security forces or Afghan security forces carrying out human rights abuses, or Iraqi forces carrying out human rights abuses, or we’re building prisons in Haiti for a corrupt government to have thousands of political prisoners, or whether we’re arresting suspected Taliban insurgents and bagging their heads and sending them off to Bagram Air Base to be raped and tortured or off to Guantanamo, these are crimes under international law.

“So when [Junior Foreign Affairs minister] Peter Kent says…an attack on Israel is an attack on Canada, we can throw up our arms and say that’s appalling, or we can actually say that’s pretty useful political fodder for resisting these programs, because the vast majority of people don’t agree with Peter Kent’s statement. And that gives you an avenue into saying, well, where do we draw the line on our support, and where do Israel’s crimes become our crimes? Where did the Afghan government’s crimes become our crimes?

“International law is crystal clear on this.”