Document leaks and Neo-Colonialism. . . .

There are already numerous condemnations of yesterday's leaks of documents relating to the war in Afghanistan, including one bizarre Liberal blogger calling for the death penalty. Of course how one feels about the leaks will largely reflect how one feels about the war. Only those with the most blind acceptance of the Western spin on the war could possibly talk about the death-penalty regarding such leaks. The Western spin is really pretty  simple and is very similar to the kinds of spin that the West has been using since the beginning of the era of colonialism with a few particulars for time and place. If you buy this story you essentially believe that the Western nations were essentially 'innocent' victims of a set of more or less crazy Muslim fundamentalists (the so-called Taliban) who, so the West would have us believe, were operating out of Afghanistan. According to this view, the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan were part of a concerted effort to undermine these Muslim organizations who have little more against Western nations than "hating our freedoms."

This view has as little to do with recent events than the "white-man's burden" of 'spreading religion and civilization to ignorant heathens' had to do with the real motivations of Western colonialism. First of all to accept the idea of an innocent West being the target or victim of an irrational radical Muslim movement is to ignore centuries of history. Whether one agrees with their reasons or not, one cannot ignore that Arabs and Muslims have much to be chagrined about when it comes to Western actions in various Muslim regions. If one payed close attention to the events immediately following the events of 911 you could discern the real political issues that were at stake. When Bin Laden was seen on video taking credit for the tragic events in NYC he gave three primary reasons for these events. These reasons were 1. the sanctions that the West used against Iraq in the 1990s which by all independent reports were responsible for literally hundreds of thousands of children. 2. The continued presence of Western military forces in Saudi Arabia, and 3. The brutality and hypocrisy with which the Palestinians have been treated by Western Nations. Regardless of one's political viewpoint, these are legitimate political concerns which, regardless of their source, need to be treated seriously. This does not justify the events of 911, but it does cast considerable doubt on the Western image of Bin Laden as nothing but a mad religious fanatic hell-bent on the destruction of the West simply because he hates modern social democracy. Furthermore, there were in fact few, or even no, genuine 'terrorist' camps in Afghanistan. Rural Pakistan was, and continues to be, the real location of most of the so-called 'terrorist' organizations about which the West professed to be concerned.

The Western nations later replaced their 'terrorist' camps arguments with talk of altruistic concerns about the people of Afghanistan. But if one takes a realistic political (that is to say 'real politik') viewpoint, one can hardly be fooled by all the spin concerning the Western motivations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And if one had been paying attention in the nineties one would know that men like Dick Cheney had long made plans for consolidating US power and influence in the Middle East and other geo-politically sensitive areas. To buy into talk of altruism or a defense of justice and democracy on the part of the West seems to me to be hopelessly naive. Though the altruistic spin is still prevalent in the days of neo-colonialism as it once was with real colonialism, it is just as specious. As with most, if not all, wars Afghanistan and Iraq are about money and power. The war in Iraq is now the most expensive war ever waged and much of the money spent has been diverted to large Western corporations. Billions of dollars of average tax-payers' money has been gathered and diverted to arms makers and dealers as well as other kinds of corporations. Other monies have been spent (largely in untraceable cash) buying support from warlords (both in Afghanistan and Iraq)  for Western interests. This support is much wider than it once was but also as shallow as the stacks of cash which will eventually run out. And despite the talk of 7% more girls going to school in Afghanistan, all the Western efforts in that country have done is to prop up a dubious government which has little or no democratic legitimacy and which continues to sponsor laws such as the death-penalty for homosexuality. While propping up the Afghan dictatorship (run by Pro-Western politicians and self-interested war-lords) the West continues to support numerous other dictatorships in the region where women have few or no legal rights and where the governments don't even go through the motions of 'democracy.' The existence of a perpetual enemy (a la  1984) which justifies not only the extension of Western power and the diversion of government funds from average people to powerful corporations, are the real motivations of these wars. If the West had really been interested in peace and the living conditions of people in the region they would have used a small portion of the monies spent in those wars and constructed a viable and prosperous Palestinian State as well as bringing greater democracy to other close Western allies.

With these issues in mind, I see the recent document leaks as part of an effort to lay bare the actions of governments engaged in a neo-colonial effort to further dominate a region where oil plays a central role in nation building. Just as anti-colonialists like Gandhi and Franz Fanon were engaged in concerted efforts to expose the real motivations of Western Colonialism, people must now engage in an effort to expose the real motivations behind the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Where did MR. Attaran see these documents. . . .?

So now the question must be asked: Where did Amir Attaran see these documents?? And if he has seen them why haven't our elected officials seen them? 

Mr. Attaran has accused the government of war crimes based upon documents that he has seen but that the government insists that our own representative are not allowed to see. And since Mr. Attaran is a professor of law, he knows the implications of accusing the government of war crimes on national television. He must be pretty sure of himself in this regard. But he knows that if the Government takes legal action against him it will only get them further into the mire in which they now find themselves. 

The next week should be very interesting. 

Wars in the Middle East, imperialism part. . . . Oh I lost count.

It amazes me that there are still people out there who believe that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea. The greatest irony of the war was, of course, the simple fact that the invasion, and the entire ‘Bush-Doctrine’ was a violation of the very international laws that the invaders claimed that they were enforcing in the first place. This should be enough to dissuade any rational person from supporting the war to begin with. However, despite their claims to the contrary, those who supported and continue to support the war have very little rationality on their side anyway.

Supporters of the war were of course forced to abandon their initial arguments for the war very soon after the actual invasion. The idea of WMDs went by the wayside very quickly. This fact should motivate any rational person to doubt the legitimacy of the invasion not just because there were no weapons but because it makes clear that the actual motivation for the invasion was contrary to the publically stated one. Now given the history of British and American imperialism, anyone who fails to understand that the invasion of Iraq was motivated by a continuation of this history must either a) tacitly support this history or b) be so wildly uninformed about American and British actions over the past 100 years or so that they really can’t understand this issue to begin with.

The invaders quickly found a new spin to put on their illegal action – so-called “regime change.” Now this is a strange one since they are the very ones who set up the regime in the first place and continued to support it through the worst of its abuses as long as it functioned as an ally in the region. George Bush senior even addressed a joint meeting of Congress begging them not to pull funding from Iraq after Hussein gassed the Kurds because though he had done some pretty nasty stuff, he was still an American ally and deserved financial and military support.

The Iraqi State going “rouge” didn’t mean it was a brutal dictatorship or that it killed its own people, in American parlance it meant that Iraq would no longer do the American bidding exactly the way they wanted it done. This is where we must question the long history of US and British support of every kind of terrible dictatorship. The Shah in Iran, Surharto in Indonesia, the so-called Malayan Emergency, countless dictatorships in Africa and Latin America, the list is too long to recite.

So the argument of ‘regime change’ begs the question, if the US and Britain were so concerned about the evils of the regime in Iraq why did they support it for so long and why do they continue to support dictatorships all over the world and undermine democratically elected leaders when they don’t conform to US and British globalization strategies? (By the way, the US and British support of the de facto dictatorships in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, two states that they use to launch attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq respectively, should be enough to make any rational person doubt the argument of regime change. )

The answer is, as it usually is, a combination of factors. One is that the US and Britain have proven time and again that they have no real interest in human rights or democracy except where they can manipulate them in order to further their overall strategy of the movement of Capital. The Iraqi regime had become a serious thorn in the side of this strategy particularly because of the movement of oil and the need to blindly support the State of Israel as the main military force in the Middle East. With dwindling justification for the military spending in the US in particular, a serious new motivation had become necessary for such expenditures. Dick Cheney had already made this argument in a frighteningly explicit way years before the invasion of Iraq. US military expenditure constitutes not only the largest in the world by far by also has been the most effective way for the US government to funnel huge amounts of tax money from average people to large corporations such as Lockheed – Martin, General Dynamic, and others. Beginning with the invasion of Iraq, this spending not only went on undeterred but actually increased with the formation of huge deficits spent almost solely on the purchasing, design, and use of new weaponry.

An overall justification for huge military expenditure was the primary motivation of the invasion of Iraq. The Bush Doctrine, the Cheney-doctrine (sometime referred to as the One Percent Solution) and the so-called ‘Wolfowitz Doctrine’ which has its origins in the 1990s, all add up to the necessity of finding a serious war that would be able to turn the attention of the US population (and hopefully the populations of other states like Britain) to a resurgence of the military-industrial complex which guarantees the supremacy of a Capitalist class which can continue their raping of not only their citizens but of the world’s resources.

“Regime Change” was just another neo-imperialist spin, not unlike the way the so-called ‘white man’s burden’ was the spin for the initial phase of British imperialism. A frighteningly obvious exposure of this fact is that the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to be de facto dictatorships run by undue Western control. Now instead of children dying because of Western supported sanctions they die because of the use birth defects created from the use of radioactive and phosphorous weapons during the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US and Britain continue to support dictatorships bordering on both Iraq and Afghanistan, and they continue to tacitly allow Israel to maintain an Apartheid-like situation in the occupied territories.

Every justification of the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq is either naïve or based on a fundamental lie about US and British neo-imperialist goals. Over the past few months, the situation in Afghanistan has become particularly blatant in its effrontery to reason as we have watched bogus elections and the increasing power of war-lords running the country. Countries like Canada who had normally not been engaged in these kind s of neo-imperialist adventures now find themselves in the position of supporting a non-elected government which imprisons its people indiscriminately, uses torture routinely, and punishes homosexuality with death. Meanwhile in Iraq, different forces jockey for position against the backdrop of continued death, destruction, and extreme want. Independent organizations like Amnesty continue to show that Iraq is a torture state while birth defects run rabid through the country.  Thousands of US troops continue to be in Iraq with no schedule for departure and any hint of democratic decisions that contravene US goals are quickly put down.

Regime change really meant no change at all because the more things change the more they stay the same.

For those still unconvinced let me make a simple analogy. Let's say a guy goes into a room full of Mafia Dons and he shoots one of them, justifying his act of murder with the claim that he did it because the gangster was involved in murder and organized crime. If the same man then drinks and socializes with many of the other Gangsters and publicly calls them his friends despite the fact that they are guilty of the very same crimes as the man he just murdered, then we can reasonably assume that his stated motivation for his act was a lie. If we then investigate the man and learn that not only has he supported this and many other Mafia leaders in the past but has been guilty of the very same crimes that he claimed to have motivated his act of murder, then we have learned that far from an altruistic act of charity, this was what they call in New York, a gangland slaying. Now we may not mourn the death of that particular Mafia leader we also cannot justify his murder by another criminal who has done so simply as part of the typical jockeying for position by Gangsters. 

Fact: The US, just like the murderer in our analogy, supported Hussein for years while he was guilty of the same crimes they later condemned. 

Fact: The US, just like the murderer in our analogy, continues to support (with financial and military aid) other dictators in the region who are guilty of the same crimes.

Fact: The US, just like the murderer in our analogy, is guilty of the very same crimes all over the world.

Fact: The US is the largest producer of weapons in the world, selling them to many dictatorships.

Fact: After the end of the Soviet Union the US lost its primary justification for the more than 50% of its national budget that it spends on the military-industrial complex.

Fact: At the end of George Bush Sr.'s reign as president Cheney and Wolfowitz wrote documents specifically saying that the US needed a major Military event to justify its continued military supremacy. 

Simple Conclusion: The US invaded Iraq (and in large part Afghanistan) to reinvigorate its military position and spending in a post cold-war world. 

 

The hopeless Liberals. . . .

The Federal Liberal Party is, and has been for a few years now, the most hopeless group of strategists gathered in one party that I have seen outside of the American Democrats. 

It now seems clear that the Liberals are backing away from their effort to force the Government to abide by an order of the House and produce documents relating to the Afghan detainee issue. They are making noise again about a federal inquiry but they will soon let that go as well. It seems that they have backed off because the the proverbial fear of an election after the so-called Olympic boost and the good press that they think the PM has received over the Federal Response to Haiti. 

So once again we are back to the same story, the Liberals bluster about actually doing their job in opposition but when the time comes they back off because they don't see ideal conditions for an election.

When are the Liberals going to understand, winning conditions for an elections are not going to simply appear out of thin air??? YOU MUST CREATE THE CONDITIONS!!! And you do this by pushing key issues and refusing to back off. IT IS REALLY SIMPLE! 

Take this issue of the order of the House to produce documents. If you find the Government in contempt and banish a couple of ministers from the House (or even imprison them which the House has the right to do) as a penalty, this unprecedented step would make world headlines and cripple Harper. Parties that have been found in contempt and have Minister in Jail don't win elections except in Honduras. 

For some reason, conservative (not just in Canada but most Western nations) are the only ones willing to play hardball anymore. And each time you push and then back off like the Liberals constantly do, you lose a little more credibility and you bolster Harper's image of untouchability. 

Fight back you idiots, or face extinction. 

Humphrey and history

In 1967  Hubert Humphrey travelled to Germany. During that visit some s0-called 'hippie' trouble-makers had plans to bomb him during a speaking engagement. The Police thwarted the attack which turned out to me nothing but a bomb full of pudding. Not much retribution for a guy who had taken such an active part in the Vietnam war where US forces killed literally hundreds of thousands of souls. 

Today a NATO rocket killed 12 civilians. Sadly a fairly small event in a long war where thousands of civilians have died. When I was growing up in the States, politicians and people never tired of telling me that the war in Vietnam was a morally just war in service of Christian good. They demonized the people they were fighting in Vietnam so their deaths would somehow not really count. History  has rendered its verdict. 

Do you think the parents of the children that have died in NATO bombings care whether their children were killed by this side or that side? I doubt it very much. I think they just mourn for their children who have been sacrificed to decades (perhaps centuries) of struggle for power between ruling classes who care little for the people in their thirst for money, gold, oil and influence. 

Another Open letter to my MP, Poillievre. . . .

Merriam-Webster defines Hypocrisy as: a feigning to what one is not or to believe what one does not; especially: the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion.

 

Tell me, Mr. Poillievre, have you ever actually looked at a dictionary? Excuse my disparaging tone, but I am beginning to find it difficult to understand how you can function in such a wildly hypocritical manner and, going on the assumption that one should never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by ignorance, I compelled to assume that you must simply be ignorant of the most basic facts and tenets of socially acceptable behavior. Thus I provide you with the above definition incase it has somehow missed your notice.

I mean, after all, your party was elected, albeit by a minority of Canadians, on a platform of more accountability and less power in the hands of the Prime Minister. And we must keep in mind that this issue of accountability was not simply a small side line of the Conservative stated agenda but was the cornerstone of the platform; something on which your leader and the entire Party constantly harped on as though the future of our political institutions depended upon increases in accountability.

Now, since I can’t assume that you are so blind or stupid that you cannot see that accountability under your government has decreased and the power of the Prime Minister has increased, I can only assume that you have entirely abandoned these principles or were never actually in favor of them in the first place.

And even if you and your Party were hypocritical in the assertion of these beliefs in the first place, this hypocrisy has reached epic proportions in your public statements regarding the prorogation of the House and the Afghan issue in general. You know, YOU KNOW, that if you were in opposition and the same things happened you would be condemning the prorogation and insisting that it is your responsibility to investigate the issue of Afghan detainees. YOU KNOW THIS TO BE TRUE! Thus you are in a constant state of hypocritical action by your statements. If you were in opposition you and your Party would be vitriolic in your condemnation of any action which undermines the power of the House and the issue of Ministerial accountability. But in government you do nothing but deny, divert, obfuscate, and sometimes downright lie about these issues. But not only do you do these things, you actually have the gall to use your energy to attack the opposition parties as being irresponsible and even soft on terrorists for upholding the very same principles that your party was supposedly elected to maintain.  This is the very definition of hypocrisy.

 Furthermore, you use every means at your disposal to manipulate the media and public opinion simply to retain and enhance the centralizing power of your government. You are at the very forefront of a movement to make politics not about actual issues but an exercise in public image and opinion. I have no doubt that past governments and parties have made movements in this direction but your government has pushed this further than ever before while at the same time claiming to stand for the opposite. Future generation of all political stripes will deeply regret these lamentable movements away from substance.

I am still an optimist Mr. Poillievre and imagine that people will see through the hypocrisy and crude political manipulation which you and your Party are constantly displaying. Because you simply cannot fool enough of the people all of the time. Many of those who supported you have already seen through the hypocrisy and more will in the future. Eventually you will lose the battle to centralize all power in the PMO and this country will deeply regret this period of profound hypocrisy the same way that Americans regretted their support of Nixon or Italians regretted their support of Mussolini. This is because efforts to centralize and maintain absolute power in contemporary society are inevitably undermined by the ubiquity of information and the tendency of tyrants to push too far.

I see that you can live with your hypocrisy but the Canadian public will not do so forever. Unfortunately, part of the Reform/Conservative hypocrisy was their abandonment of their stance on MPs pensions and since you have recently qualified for yours none of this really matters to you because you will be able to comfortably retire on the public system that you so hypocritically condemn. But life will eventually catch up with you and judgment will come to you as it does to all of us. Hypocrisy develops its own punishments.

 

Kirby

 

Malalai Joya and democracy

Anyone who has been paying attention to the situation in Afghanistan has hopefully run across the remarkable Afghan woman named Malalai Joya. She is an amazing thirty year old Afghan MP who was suspended from parliament by the dark forces in that country for her outspoken criticism of the foreign occupation, the corruption in government, and president himself. While our government offers platitudes and has the gall to act as though President Karzai has been duly elected, this woman risks her life speaking about what a lie the Western invasion has been. Ms. Joya is an excellent and historic role model for young girls and women and will be proud to teach my own daughter about her life and work.

But one issue that the events surrounding Ms. Joya raises in my mind is the question of the legitimacy of democracy in our age. A great deal of what have come to expect from democracy has vanish slowly before our eyes and has gone unnoticed by many in our society.  Extreme events such as those in Afghanistan often give us a glimpse into the real workings behind a process like democracy. And watching such ‘elections’ as those they recently had there illustrate the real failings of the democratic process in the modern world. Ideally a democratic system should be nurtured by a healthy public sphere (now sometime mistermed ‘civil society,’ a term with a long and complex history) in which ideas about the ‘good life’ and our collective future are openly debated in honest meaningful way. However, in recent years such an ideal has receded so far beyond reach that we cannot even talk about a fair process let alone reach that process.  Money and power have corrupted the system so severely that the vast majority of people don’t even understand the possibilities of political debate anymore. The influence of money in the process gradually narrows the terms of debate and the essence of our collective possibilities to the point that democracy grows gradually meaningless. It is similar to being stranded on a desert island with, say, twenty people, and three of them have most of the supplies and guns. Even if one attempted to institute a democratic decision making process in such circumstances they would mean little because the three people with the inherent power would easily control the terms of the debate. And these three individuals were also mean-spirited and nasty (as our present leaders here in Canada are) democracy would become completely meaningless.

Ms. Joya reminds us of the courage of some individuals in the face of the threat of death to work for justice. Unfortunately she also reminds us of the corruption of democracy and the degree to which the ideals of democracy are quickly receding. 

Does Torture Matter?

A number of things are disturbing about the recent outbreak of the story concerning Canada’s role in the torture of so-called Afghan detainees. The first thing that comes to mind regarding the distastefulness of this story (other than the very fact of torture itself) is the fact that this story has been around for years but the media has largely ignored it. Anyone who was paying even the slightest bit of attention to the events in Afghanistan knew full-well that torture has been a matter of course in the prisons of Afghanistan ever since we began to prop-up what is a corrupt, undemocratic, essentially fascist state there. Until Mr. Colvin testified in front of a House committee, the media simply stayed silent on this issue and bought the line of the Harper Government that we have no hard proof and therefore torture must not be happening. Shame on the media one more time for largely ignoring a story until it becomes fashionable. By the way, all reliable sources tell us that torture is also routine in Pakistan, another Canadian ally, and no one talks about that story either. The media has also failed utterly to make it clear that for Government officials to be indictable for war crimes they didn’t actually have to have proof of torture. All that really matters is that detainees were handed over in the presence of a reasonable suspicion of torture. This is the part of the story that the government is most afraid of. Other distasteful elements in this whole story include the Government’s horrendous attempts at assassinating the character of Mr. Colvin as though suddenly this high-placed diplomat is a fool or a patsy because he has been willing to take seriously what everyone already knew.  Amnesty International has been an outspoken critic of the Afghan government’s use of torture so why don’t we see Peter Mackay stand up daily in the House of Commons and tell us that Amnesty International has no credibility and is being manipulated by the Taliban.

But by far the most disturbing thing about this whole story is the number of people, who have essentially don't really seem upset by the prospect of a few Taliban prisoners having been tortured because they are only Taliban, and the only thing that really matters is the idea of a cover-up. This is part of a disturbing trend since the events of 911 whereby groups of people are marginalized to the point that they don’t qualify for the very human rights for which we have supposedly been fighting. The fact is that this attitude is the very reason that this has been allowed to happen in the first place. People have systematically ignored the fact that torture has been happening because for far too many in the West the people of Afghanistan don’t really matter. Thousands of civilians have been killed, we have propped-up with military what Malalai Joya calls a photo-copy of the Taliban Government, we have stood by and tacitly endorsed torture, all in the interests of a geo-political struggle to assert Western power in a strategically important region at a strategically important moment in history. Until people realize that this war has never been about helping a few young girls attend school in Afghanistan, the torture that the media has ignored and that Mr. Harper secretly endorses won’t matter. 

My political naivety . . .

I think that I suffer from a certain degree of political naivety. I grew up in the US amidst the Vietnam war and eve as a kid I had a sense of how people were appalled by what they saw as an unjust, neo-colonial escapade. Yet when the first gulf war began and I was involved in the anti-war protests, I was just monumentally shocked that the West was able to perpetrate another such all-out war less than 20 years after the war in Indo-China had ended. And then I was still shocked when the US was able to instigate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which were so obviously more blatant efforts by the West to control geo-politics through a brutal war effort.

In the past year I have done a great deal of research for my book which has involved reading about the French Revolution and the British reaction to the events in France. Such research demonstrates that the same types of ideological efforts at defending war and oppression have been going on for centuries. Yet I am still shocked that average people are largely uninformed and utter incapable of seeing through the lies of the rich and powerful who perpetrate wars in their own interests while average people do the fighting and dying.

But my naivety continues because I am totally shocked that any Canadians are willing to support a government that is not only incompetent but self-interesting, mean-spirited, and profoundly corrupt. It just shocks me and I can’t get past it. I continue to be amazed that people will let their biases allow them to stand up for the most shockingly atrocious actions as long as those actions are committed in the name of their ideology.

So it goes . . . 

Colonialism, Afghanistan and human rights....

I have opposed Western involvement in Afghanistan from the beginning because like almost every Western military escapade, the motivation here is about money and power. In this case it is specifically about the control of oil resources in western Asia. Of course Western powers put an entirely expected spin on this military adventure, suggesting at first that it was because we needed to put an end to terrorist training camps. This appears to have been a simple straight-forward lie – there were only a handful of insurgents in Afghanistan and these were Kashmir separatists. Then the standard line was that we were saving the people (particularly the women) from the Taliban. Anyone who has been paying attention to this situation knows that this has never been true. Western governments said shamefully little about the condition of women in Afghanistan before the invasion. Furthermore, for the past six years or so we have been propping up a hopelessly corrupt government in Afghanistan which has shown time and again that it has no genuine interest in human rights. Homosexuality has been a criminal offence in Afghanistan punishable by death while we have been touting our defense of the poor Afghans. Now the situation has been made clear by the recent institution of sharia law for some citizens of Afghanistan. This legislation would essentially legalize marital rape and control women’s lives in horrible ways. The Harper and Obama governments have made a bunch of noise about this but really they are just hoping that it will fade away and they can continue with their neo-colonial agenda unfettered. The truth is that once again US and Canadian soldiers are dying for Wall St. and oil companies and their families appear on television and radio calling their fallen relatives “Heroes” because if they faced up to the reality it would just be too horrible to contemplate. The West continues on with the same agenda it has been pursuing for years: kill, control, and colonize and wrap it all up in a flag of altruism.  

Some Thoughts on Power

I recently became engaged in an internet argument with someone who had accused Emma Goldman of being an agent of British Imperialism. This struck me as a particularly odd accusation and I tried to get to the bottom of it through a discourse with the accuser, always a difficult thing to do through email. But I did this because the person who had made the accusation seemed like a normally cogent and rational person. Perhaps it is needless to say that I received no satisfaction. The person continually failed to make it clear if he really thought Goldman was an actual ‘agent’ of British Imperial forces or just a dupe of that system. I thought that perhaps he were really just claiming that the actions of the US anarchists somehow played into the hands of British interests, and I waited for some evidence for this claim but none was forthcoming, instead I just condescended to with the claim that I didn’t understand the subtleties of British Imperialism. Even in the face of no evidence, I proceeded to argue that even if anarchists like Goldman had somehow played into the hands of the British, it was an entirely unintended consequence of their actions. Similarly, I said, if Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia had served to strengthen the position of the Russian aristocracy, this did not mean that the French Emperor was somehow an agent, or even dupe, of the Czar; it just means that the flow of power is a complex and tricky thing and any action, dissent in particular, can have deeply influential unintended consequences. After a number of emails and condemnations of British Imperialism, I finally realized that this person was just a disgruntled US citizen who saw red whenever he thought of Goldman because he thought she was involved in the assassination of President McKinley for whom he seemed to have a soft spot. Funny enough, this is another accusation for which there is no real evidence. Anyway, I thought it was funny that he would be upset about British Imperialism when one considers the role that McKinley played in US imperialism; it was under McKinley’s rule, after all, that the US annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The sad fact is that many Americans, and I grew up as an American, simply cannot see that US policy has been a clear form of Imperialism for over a hundred years.

But even if my internet adversary does not, I understand mixed effects of actions, even Imperialism. I have opposed US actions in the Middle East since I first became politically involved. And the recent events are typical examples of US Imperial actions. Even right-wing commentators like Eric Margolis continue to point out that the US invasion of Afghanistan has largely been a front for their efforts to find a cheap and reliable way of drawing oil out of the former Soviet states to the north of Afghanistan. Recently the government of Tajikistan gave notice to the US that they have to close the Manas airbase on their territory. But even here one finds mixed results. For example large numbers of Tajik farmers have accused the US of destroying their crops through land grabs, pollution, and carelessness. On the other hand members of the US forces in the country have raised funds to build schools and give healthcare to poor children. Overall, I think one has to opposed Imperialism, whether it is of the British or US variety, because its goals and effects are overwhelmingly problematic. But it should be clear to everyone who is willing to look carefully at any geo-political event that the power flows in multiple directions at once, particularly in advanced Capitalist states, and conceptions of it should be oversimplified. This is the greatest lesson of Antonio Gramsci’s work on Cultural Hegemony which should be read and enjoyed by all.

Support the Troops Continued

We know for certain now, due to an accidental release of information, that the Canadian forces are handing child soldiers over to the Afghan secret police. This is being done in direct violation of international agreements and is an abandonment of the principles of human rights. It is also being done while there is a UNICEF centre in Kabul that is prepared to take this child soldiers and treat them in the manner that international agreement demands. Instead they are being handed over the secret police who are known to have been engaging in torture!

Support the troops? I don’t think so.

Should we support the troops?

I wrote this a while ago and was really unsure whether to post it because I think it is such an inflammatory opinion that in our present state of creeping fascism it could be a dangerous opinion. But I decided to post this because, in the words of Coleridge; "Truth should be spoken at all times, but more especially at those times, when to speak the truth is dangerous." Like many on the left, I opposed the Taliban long before it was a pet project of Western governments. But as a prelude to this post I should make it clear that I don't believe that the military effort in Afghanistan is really motivated by its stated goal of fighting a brand of dangerously 'radical' Islam. Rather, the war in Afghanistan is part of a wider effort of the West to control the Middle East. If the West really wanted to undermine 'radical' Islam they would concentrate all of their efforts creating a viable and prosperous homeland for the Palestinians and pressuring countries like Saudi Arabia to be more democratic thus undermining the fundamental constituency of this particular ideology. To say that the war in Afghanistan is an effort to undermine 'radical' Islam is like a fire department saying that they are going use gasoline to fight fires from now on.

With that said, I offer you the following opinion.

I grew up in the United States during the Vietnam era and I have vivid memories of the public debate surrounding the war. One particular experience stands out in my mind. I recall an eager young teacher once asking my class what it meant to be ‘patriotic.’ After a number of my peers gave her standard answers about loving one’s country and supporting its principles and causes, the teacher asked us a question that really stuck in my head: ‘Don’t you think,’ she said, ‘that being a patriot might sometimes mean disagreeing with something your country was doing?’ Now, while this question doesn’t not seem particularly revolutionary today, at the time it was something of a revelation to me.

But despite my continual hope that what this teacher said was true, I have been consistently suspicious of overt patriotism or nationalistic sentiments. I have usually been more sympathetic with Thomas Paine’s quip that ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ But Paine was writing in a time that was, in a number of ways, more radical than our own despite the fact that he lived two hundred years ago. Paine and many of his contemporaries wrote things that today would be shunned from public discourse. For example, just recently I was reading an essay by Mary Wollstonecraft, considered by many as the founder of modern feminism, in which she quite seriously contended that the very existence of a standing army was contrary to the principles of democracy. Very few people would take such an idea seriously today.

Instead, during my lifetime I have watched the standing of the military in public life go from a low ebb during the Vietnam era to the level of blind enthusiasm today. Even ‘left-wing’ politicians fall over each other to assert their ‘support’ for the military as though it is an institution of saints that can do no wrong. During the late 70s and most of the 80s, western populations were so suspicious of military efforts that most of them were conducted covertly or by ‘proxy’ forces such as the Contras in Nicaragua. But today the status of the military and its nationalistic escapades has quite successfully been restored. This resurrection has largely been achieved by ‘personalizing’ our military efforts. One important part of this strategy is the so-called embedding of journalists into military outfits. This is a simple psychological strategy by which journalists are put in a situation in which they would acquire a natural sympathy for the soldiers around them and this would be reflected in the way they reported on the war. It is, after all, easy to demonize an enemy who is shooting at your pals. As for the rest of the population we have been inundated by the phrase, ‘Support the Troops.’ This notion popularizes the idea that regardless of how we might feel about any particular foreign policy, the troops are just a bunch of great guys doing their best and putting their lives on the line for you and me. Of course it is never that easy and the fallout from this slogan is that it becomes increasingly easy to demonize anyone who opposes the actions of our armed forces. Almost our entire population has fallen into this little psychological trap that allows the worst kind of patriotism to worm its way back into society until it has become so overwhelming that no one would publically announce that they don’t support our troops.

But however unpopular it might be let me encourage everyone to retain the right not to support the troops. I contend that regardless of popular sympathies, such a declaration is not only within our rights but it is morally and politically coherent and can be discursively redeemed, at least within a public sphere that has not been blinded by patriotism.

The first reason that such an idea is defensible is that the very notion of supporting a state’s troops regardless of the foreign policy which they are enforcing is itself absurd, morally indefensible, and dangerous. If such a separation of soldiers and their military efforts is taken to its logical conclusion it means that we should support ‘our troops’ regardless of what they are doing. Thus if we were living in Germany in 1942 it would be ok to oppose the existence of death camps as a policy but essential to support the troops who were rounding up Jews, homosexuals, and political opponents of the Nazi Party. I believe that such an example demonstrates that members of the military and political and social implications of their actions are inseparable.
People who insist that we must blindly support the troops forget basic facts as well as the simplest lessons of history. The first thing these people forget is that the armed forces are a fundamentally political force, one of the essential jobs of which has historically been to control their own population. During the important revolutions of the modern era in which the population struggled for justice it has been the military that has been called out to suppress them in the interests of political and economic elites. The most recent example of this happened in Burma where soldiers indiscriminately killed Buddhist monks. Anyone who believes that couldn’t happen here today is irretrievably naive.

This brings us to the sad reasons that the above fact is true and the other important lesson of history that most people forget. The military is and always has been a brutal institution that functions on the essential ingredient of blind obedience. The armed forces create a psychological dependence that generates a kind of familial atmosphere of unquestioned loyalty. Soldiers do what they are told to do regardless of its moral or political content. Thus the entire course of human history is full of terrible acts committed by individuals who were simply following orders. It is the height of arrogance to believe that we are somehow above all of this and that our ‘sons and daughters’ are incapable of doing wrong. Examine this simple fact: there are few, if any, significant examples in history in which soldiers en masse refused the orders given to them by their superiors, whether it is the killing of Buddhist monks in Burma, the establishment of death-camps in Germany, the fire-bombing of Dresden, or the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The other day on a CBC radio show I heard a humorous iteration of this simple lesson of military order and obedience. The speaker, the name of whom I don’t recall, said it is absurd for military leaders to constantly claim in the public media that the troops support the present mission in Afghanistan. “They are soldiers,” he pointed out, “they believe whatever they are told to believe. If they are told to unload a truck, they passionately ‘believe’ in unloading the truck.”
In the case of conflict, soldiers are taught to demonize and de-humanize the enemy (even if that ‘enemy’ is part of their own domestic population) and they are thus brutalized and taught to brutalize in turn. This is not to contend that they are therefore incapable of good or morally upstanding acts. But even the most ethically righteous soldiers are constantly caught in a moral double-bind in which they must believe that their side is right and that those that oppose them are somehow morally degenerate. And of course those that oppose them must believe the exact same thing.

In the end, of course this entire argument relies on a complex political position that contends that whatever soldiers might want to be, in the final analysis, they are pawns in the state’s effort to assert its political and economic interests through military escapades which are always given some form of altruistic or even humanitarian spin. This position, which I believe to be rationally coherent and demonstrable, asserts that the vast majority of military efforts throughout history, and this includes those in Iraq and Afghanistan, are essentially politically and economically motivated in the interests of land, power, and money. And if one takes this position, then soldiers are at best the pawns of political and economic elites who are taught to use brutal force in order to fulfill these elite interests. This, I believe, extends to our own troops in Afghanistan who, despite any good they may hope to do, are part of a concerted neo-colonial effort led by the United States to gain effective control over the entire middle-east region and make billions of dollars for companies like Haliburton in the process. And the spin given to this neo-colonial effort is very similar to the one given to the original effort of Western colonialism; to save these people from themselves and bring them democracy.

This is why when someone tells me that they support the troops, I tell them that I don’t support them but I do pity them.