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?

Head in the Sand

I caught longtime activist Yves Engler at Queen's yesterday promoting his new publication, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy. You can be sure I immediately snapped up a copy. As should be obvious if you've read any of my previous posts, I've been consistently critical of American foreign policy and imperialist wars in general. However, my knowledge of Canada's own international crimes has been sadly lacking. Aside from the most obvious cases, such as the war in Afghanistan, I have largely fallen into the same mindset as most Canadian establishment journalists - i.e., that we are a benevolent, peaceful nation, standing in stark contrast to the more aggressively capitalist and militarist United States.

Call it patriotism, nationalism, or ethnocentric chauvinism, but that is essentially what results when one uncritically supports whatever their country does. While I have been aware of the Harper government's shameful neglect of Canadian citizens imprisoned abroad, such as Omar Khadr and Abousfian Abdelrazik, and its professed support of Israeli war crimes in Gaza, I have still subconsciously clung to the notion of Canada as peacekeeper. What Engler reminds us is that no country is ever as good as its public statements would suggest. He highlights the important fact that we should always regard government words with skepticism, and that Canadians in particular have paid far too much attention to our government's words rather than its actions. If we examine the historical record, the evidence of Canadian compliance in or advocacy of imperialist crimes is damning indeed.

Engler makes a convincing case that throughout our history, Canada has always supported the actions of the preeminent imperial power of the day, be that Great Britain or the USA. Thus, even when it appears on the surface that we have taken a brave stand against American foreign policy, if one digs deeper we usually find either aquiescence to broader U.S. policy or the aiding and abetting of American aggression. Praise of Lester Pearson's famous 1965 speech at Temple University in which he called for a pause in American bombing of North Vietnam - which has been cited even by leftist journalists like Linda McQuaig as an example of Canada's peaceful nature - ignores the more salient truth that Canada largely supported American anti-communist policy in Southeast Asia and even allowed Agent Orange to be tested in New Brunswick, due to the similarity of the foliage to that of Vietnam.

Similarly, despite our much-ballyhooed opposition to the Iraq War in 2003, Canada provided implict support to U.S. forces by allowing the use of our air space, providing logistical support, sending naval vessels to patrol the Arabian Sea, providing equipment such as aircraft, and even sending a small number of soldiers to participate in the conflict, including General Walter Natynczyk, now Chief of the Defence Staff of the Canadian Forces. Our role in Iraq is best summarized by Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang in their book The Unexpected War:

In an almost schizophrenic way, the government bragged publicly about its decision to stand aside from the war in Iraq because it violated core principles of multilateralism and support for the United Nations. At the same time, senior Canadian officials, military officers and politicians were currying favour in Washington, privately telling anyone in the State Department of the Pentagon who would listen that, by some measures, Canada's indirect contribution to the American war effort in Iraq – three ships and 100 exchange officers – exceeded that of all but three other countries that were formally part of the coalition.

In the same vein, Canada's rejection of the American embargo on Cuba was not an act of benevolence and common sense, but was designed to serve American interests. In his book Three Nights in Havana, Robert Wright lays it out for us:

Recently declassified State Department documents have revealed that, far from encouraging Canada to support the embargo, the United States secretly urged Diefenbaker to maintain normal relations because it was thought that Canada would be well-positioned to gather intelligence on the island.

Upon closer reflection, none of this should surprise us. Canada is no better or worse than any other country in that its foreign policy is largely dictated by the concerns of an elite establishment. Imperialism, whether British or American, serves the needs of Canadian business interests, who therefore have no trouble supporting neo-colonial adventures in the Middle East or Africa. Aside from acting as a junior partner to larger imperial powers, we have also engaged in the neoliberal exploitation of developing nations, ensuring that Canadian corporations have free rein to extract resources from those impoverished countries. It's really no surprise that our foreign policy elite acts in this way, since it's the same in any country: you only have to follow the money to know why nations often engage in such behaviour without broad popular support.

Canada's exploitive urges are limited only by the size of our population and our resources, not by any claim to moral superiority. To ignore this fact is to fall into the same trap as chest-thumping nationalists south of the border, who I have so often criticized because, let's face it, it's easier to criticize others than to take an honest look in the mirror. Writers such as Glenn Greenwald have noted American hypocrisy in decrying human rights abuses by official enemies such as Iran while ignoring America's own record of torture, international aggression and flouting of the rule of law. For me to continue to criticize those abuses while downplaying my own country's crimes would be utterly hypocritical. In that sense, Engler's book was more than worth the $15.