British Army deploys new weapon based on mass-killing technology - Parliament not told, minister says
John Byrne
Parliament not told, minister says
A new 'super-weapon' being supplied to British soldiers in Afghanistan employs technology based on the "thermobaric" principle which uses heat and pressure to kill people targeted across a wide air by sucking the air out of lungs and rupturing internal organs.
The so-called "enhanced blast" weapon uses similar technology used in the US "bunker busting" bombs and the devastating bombs dropped by the Russians to destroy the Chechen capital, Grozny.
Such weapons are brutally effective because they first disperse a gas or chemical agent which is lit at a second stage, allowing the blast to fill the spaces of a building or the crevices of a cave. When the US military deployed a version of these weapons in 2005, DefenseTech wrote an article titled, "Marines Quiet About Brutal New Weapon."
According to the US Defense Intelligence Agency, which released a study on thermobaric weapons in 1993, "The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique--and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.… If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents."
A second DIA study said, "shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue... it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate."
"The effect of an FAE explosion within confined spaces is immense," said a CIA study of the weapons. "Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness."
British defense officials told the UK Guardian that British bombs were "different."
"They are optimized to create blast [rather than heat]", one said, speaking on the standard condition of anonymity in Britain. The official added that it would be misleading to call them "thermobaric."
Officials told the Guardian the new weapon was classified as a soldier launched "light anti-structure munition" and that the bombs would be more effective because "even when they hit the damage is limited to a confined area."
"The continuing issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan has enormous importance in the battle for hearts and minds," said Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell in the article. "If these weapons contribute to the deaths of civilians then a primary purpose of the British deployment is going to be made yet more difficult."
According to Campbell, the deployment of the weapons was not announced to Parliament.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Spare Me The ‘Ravers’, But Even I, Robert Fisk, Question The ‘Truth’ About 9/11
Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience - just one - whom I call the “raver”. Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions - often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist - and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the “raver” is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a “raver”.
His - or her - question goes like this. Why, if you believe you’re a free journalist, don’t you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don’t you tell the truth - that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don’t you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows - that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what “all the world knows” (that usually is the phrase) - who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the “raver” is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then - the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd - left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.
Usually, I have tried to tell the “truth”; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument - a clincher, in my view - is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything - militarily, politically diplomatically - it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?
Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim - as the Americans did two days ago - that al-Qa’ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. “We disrupted al-Qa’ida, causing them to run,” Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named “Operation Lightning Hammer” in Iraq’s Diyala province. “Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them.” And more of the same, all of it untrue.
Within hours, al-Qa’ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas - which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush’s more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.
But - here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93’s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the crazed “research” of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster - which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers - whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C - would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower - the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) - which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering - very definitely not in the “raver” bracket - are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive”.
Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard “explosions” in the towers - which could well have been the beams cracking - are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let’s claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA’s list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were - and still are - very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.
But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose “Islamic” advice to his gruesome comrades - released by the CIA - mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family - which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder - let alone expect the text of the “Fajr” prayer to be included in Atta’s letter.
Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious “war on terror” which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush’s happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that “we’re an empire now - we create our own reality”. True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.
Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
© 2007 The Independent
His - or her - question goes like this. Why, if you believe you’re a free journalist, don’t you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don’t you tell the truth - that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don’t you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows - that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what “all the world knows” (that usually is the phrase) - who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the “raver” is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then - the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd - left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.
Usually, I have tried to tell the “truth”; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument - a clincher, in my view - is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything - militarily, politically diplomatically - it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?
Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim - as the Americans did two days ago - that al-Qa’ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. “We disrupted al-Qa’ida, causing them to run,” Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named “Operation Lightning Hammer” in Iraq’s Diyala province. “Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them.” And more of the same, all of it untrue.
Within hours, al-Qa’ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas - which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush’s more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.
But - here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93’s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the crazed “research” of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster - which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers - whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C - would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower - the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) - which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering - very definitely not in the “raver” bracket - are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive”.
Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard “explosions” in the towers - which could well have been the beams cracking - are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let’s claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA’s list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were - and still are - very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.
But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose “Islamic” advice to his gruesome comrades - released by the CIA - mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family - which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder - let alone expect the text of the “Fajr” prayer to be included in Atta’s letter.
Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious “war on terror” which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush’s happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that “we’re an empire now - we create our own reality”. True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.
Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
© 2007 The Independent
That Oriental Thang...
Why do Americans say "thang" instead of "thing" ?
Thang or thing, it's all the same... An objectification. A turn him/her into a thing.
I bet you anything if my blog was about "oriental" sex, I would make it to the highest traffic...
Ha!
I am not judging. Far from it. After all, sex is more pleasant than death...
It tintillates, entices, excites, raptures...But Iraq does not. I understand.
Iraq is hardly a turn on. As a matter of fact, you can bet it will make you limp or frigid...
Provided that you are neither already.
I have noticed something quite peculiar being around in the cyber world. There is this all pervading voyeurism forever lurking...
I mean, even one's pain is an object of careful scrutiny. But not only one's pain. This voyeurism of others, goes to the most insane extents...
Did you know I get emails asking me the size of my bra? Or for the foot fetish, the size of my shoe!?
Not that I have anything against breasts or feet, but you must admit, this is not a generation for an uprising, let alone a revolution... ha!
Then you get the heavy stuff.
I had one GI write to me, and being so kind, as I am, am witholding his name...
He said in his mail: " You can't possibly be a real Arab woman. Arab women are not like you.
I met them in Iraq. They are eager to please a man (him.) But of course, I could not never tell that to my American wife, she would get most upset. Besides, am surprised at your language, you are supposed to be a muslim."
Another Ha!
So Mr.G.I, did it ever occur to you that these "nice" women were eager to please you because you were armed to your teeth ? Demanding submissive pleasure in exchange for safety?
My, you people are such a bunch of royal shits.
I remember reading a story, unfortunately I can't find the link. But you have to trust me, I don't lie, unless absolutely necessary. Unless, I need to save my ass. But then, I think that is ok even in a court of law. It's called under duress...
There was this American G.I who escaped and this is what he said.
I remember it word for word, because I made it a point to remember it...
He said to the effect : " We would go around searching for insurgents. We arrive at a house. The men are usually not there. It takes about half an hour to bring the whole thing down. I was asked time and time again to wait outside the house. After we stormed in and ransacked the place, the seniors would go in. And we were left outside to guard the place. They would spend from 1 to 2. hours and we would hear screams inside. We could hear the women screaming. We asked no questions..."
Hmm...Oriental sex maybe? American style? Like the Abeer style?
And, what about those little Iraqi boys? The ones you picked out on the streets and boulevards? The hungry, desperate ones ? Do you remember them ?
What about the young little girls, 14 not more, and you would tell them..
"Fucking an Arab is the best"...And she would smile not understanding. And you would hand out a 5 Dollars note for a "pussy"? Do you remember her?
You don't do you ? But she does.
Ah! this oriental "thang". All those "tight" spots...
Iraq was a "tight" spot too, was she not?
Until you forced yourselves in like you did in Abu Ghraib. But Abu Ghraib is only the tip of the iceberg.
You forced yourselves into her ...
Ahh that oriental virgin thang!
And they shoot hajjis don't they ? These old "bastards", who can't speak your language.
With the look of despair in their eyes. With the look of "lost" .
So did they beg in Arabic? Did they tell you, with a broken accent "please Sir"?
And you felt so tall and so high did you not? The same way you felt with the small boy or the 14 year old girl...
Ah! tight Iraq... Saving themselves for your invasion or so you think.
People of America, I have news for you.
This is hell let loose. There is no tight here. All is flowing.
Blood is flowing, lives are flowing...
Tight bodies are flowing.
All is flowing...in one huge flood, in one huge hurricane,
that will embrace you,
embrace your "tight" hearts and equally "tight" minds...
This is no Katrina, no Dean...This is the Iraqi hurricane...
The hurricane of the little boy on the boulevard, the hurricane of the 14 years old girl that was "Awww so tight"... the hurricane of the desperate, lost, " hajji"...
And this is the Arab woman you can't identify with.
She is here. Typing away...
And reminding you of the flood that will soon engulf you.
Yeah, am that "oriental thang." So pay heed.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
Thang or thing, it's all the same... An objectification. A turn him/her into a thing.
I bet you anything if my blog was about "oriental" sex, I would make it to the highest traffic...
Ha!
I am not judging. Far from it. After all, sex is more pleasant than death...
It tintillates, entices, excites, raptures...But Iraq does not. I understand.
Iraq is hardly a turn on. As a matter of fact, you can bet it will make you limp or frigid...
Provided that you are neither already.
I have noticed something quite peculiar being around in the cyber world. There is this all pervading voyeurism forever lurking...
I mean, even one's pain is an object of careful scrutiny. But not only one's pain. This voyeurism of others, goes to the most insane extents...
Did you know I get emails asking me the size of my bra? Or for the foot fetish, the size of my shoe!?
Not that I have anything against breasts or feet, but you must admit, this is not a generation for an uprising, let alone a revolution... ha!
Then you get the heavy stuff.
I had one GI write to me, and being so kind, as I am, am witholding his name...
He said in his mail: " You can't possibly be a real Arab woman. Arab women are not like you.
I met them in Iraq. They are eager to please a man (him.) But of course, I could not never tell that to my American wife, she would get most upset. Besides, am surprised at your language, you are supposed to be a muslim."
Another Ha!
So Mr.G.I, did it ever occur to you that these "nice" women were eager to please you because you were armed to your teeth ? Demanding submissive pleasure in exchange for safety?
My, you people are such a bunch of royal shits.
I remember reading a story, unfortunately I can't find the link. But you have to trust me, I don't lie, unless absolutely necessary. Unless, I need to save my ass. But then, I think that is ok even in a court of law. It's called under duress...
There was this American G.I who escaped and this is what he said.
I remember it word for word, because I made it a point to remember it...
He said to the effect : " We would go around searching for insurgents. We arrive at a house. The men are usually not there. It takes about half an hour to bring the whole thing down. I was asked time and time again to wait outside the house. After we stormed in and ransacked the place, the seniors would go in. And we were left outside to guard the place. They would spend from 1 to 2. hours and we would hear screams inside. We could hear the women screaming. We asked no questions..."
Hmm...Oriental sex maybe? American style? Like the Abeer style?
And, what about those little Iraqi boys? The ones you picked out on the streets and boulevards? The hungry, desperate ones ? Do you remember them ?
What about the young little girls, 14 not more, and you would tell them..
"Fucking an Arab is the best"...And she would smile not understanding. And you would hand out a 5 Dollars note for a "pussy"? Do you remember her?
You don't do you ? But she does.
Ah! this oriental "thang". All those "tight" spots...
Iraq was a "tight" spot too, was she not?
Until you forced yourselves in like you did in Abu Ghraib. But Abu Ghraib is only the tip of the iceberg.
You forced yourselves into her ...
Ahh that oriental virgin thang!
And they shoot hajjis don't they ? These old "bastards", who can't speak your language.
With the look of despair in their eyes. With the look of "lost" .
So did they beg in Arabic? Did they tell you, with a broken accent "please Sir"?
And you felt so tall and so high did you not? The same way you felt with the small boy or the 14 year old girl...
Ah! tight Iraq... Saving themselves for your invasion or so you think.
People of America, I have news for you.
This is hell let loose. There is no tight here. All is flowing.
Blood is flowing, lives are flowing...
Tight bodies are flowing.
All is flowing...in one huge flood, in one huge hurricane,
that will embrace you,
embrace your "tight" hearts and equally "tight" minds...
This is no Katrina, no Dean...This is the Iraqi hurricane...
The hurricane of the little boy on the boulevard, the hurricane of the 14 years old girl that was "Awww so tight"... the hurricane of the desperate, lost, " hajji"...
And this is the Arab woman you can't identify with.
She is here. Typing away...
And reminding you of the flood that will soon engulf you.
Yeah, am that "oriental thang." So pay heed.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Insurgent American’s 35-Point Practical Guide for Action
(1) Make food. Even if its a windowsill or roof garden with a couple of tomato plants. Make a yard garden. Grow your own food, just a bit. You can expand on this later. Check out Food Not Lawns for inspiration. Start small, and don’t over stretch yourself. Succeeding early is important.
(2) Take “one more step” to oppose militarism. If you are not sporting a button or bumper sticker against the war, then start doing that. if you’re doing that, but not writing — Congress, letters to the editor, op-eds, email lists — then start writing. If you’re doing that, then give money to an antiwar effort. If you’re doing that, then start to attend local meetings. You get the idea. Take just one more step. Stopping this war will have unimaginably good ripple effects and empower all people’s movements everywhere. More ideas and up-to-date info at Bring Them Home Now!
(3) Create a blog. Blogs can be a lot more than vanity sites. They are a form of democratic communication that allow us all to be simultaneous teachers and learners, and they increase the density and survival redundancy of our communications networks. They are communications infrastructure. More blogs, more links, more sharing, more community, better coordination. Basic Blogging for Women is very helpful, for everyone, and we can also open a discussion thread here at the IA forums.
(4) Commit to study. One of the most common — and in our opinion, flawed — complaints we hear among activists and frustrated, impatient political junkies, is that there is too much writing and discussion and not enough action. Here’s what we have to say about that. Nonsense! Human agency is not simply in outwardly messing around with one’s environment. It is being a conscious agent of change. If we are walking around blindfolded, we are taking action; but if we want that action to be efficacious, then we need to see, figuratively speaking. Studying is a critical form of action. Commit to study something new, and expand your understanding of a topic or issue every chance you get. The criticality of this is the reason we include our Analysis-Synthesis section here at IA. New situations require new actions, which require new forms of understanding.
(5) Surf the Web Anonymously Its a good idea to put a layer of protection between you and the world online. One way to-do this is by creating a free email account and not associating your own name with it. Create a online handle and use that instead of your real name. Another way is by using a Proxy Server to anonymise your web surfing. Torpark is a free Windows application that can help you do this. For more information about surfing the web anonymously check out Tor from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Remember Nothing on the web is completly anonymous. If someone has the resources they can find out anthing they want. We can make it a lot harder for them though.
(6) Learn to fix something new. Divesting of our dependency means becoming better McGivers. We have to learn how stuff works, and how to tinker with it. Our dependency rest in large part on the idea that every tiny task is subdivided our to an expert, who we pay to do it for us. That means we have to have money, and we know where that goes. Our own experience is that learning to tinker with one thing gives us insights on how to tinker with a lot of things. Learn something new on a schedule. Commit to learn how to fix something new every month, every six months, no matter. Whatever works for you. How to change the rings in a leaky faucet. How to change a tire. How to caulk a bathtub. How to built a live trap for rabbits or a bird house. Anything. The Bob Vila site has all sorts of good advice on this.
(7) Start an email list. This can be a simple one-way list to which you send out things; or it can be a listserv, that functions as a discussion group. FIRST LAW… make your first message one that asks everyone if it’s okay, and says how often you will post. People hate spam. Get their permission, and if they ask to be removed, do so without hesitation of complaint. Use blind courtesy copy (BCC) to put people’s email addresses in, so their addresses aren’t shared with the world. Once established, lists are a very important way to develop corporate media bypasses. Caution: Avoid sharing whole articles on lists… just teasers that suggest what the piece is about, followed with a link. Library Support Staff has a good site on this.
(8) Join a local organizing effort. Working with people from your same geographic area is the absolute most effective and sustainable way to do social change action. Not only does the geographic proximity make meeting more do-able, people build actual friendships that way, and organizations that are bound by real friendship are both durable and cohesive. If you live in a metro area, look in the “community calendar” sections of your free entertainment weekly. One can also use the internet to find groups working nearby. Don’t use the term “progressive” in your search parameters, however. It’s in a lot of corporate names, and the meaning of that term is very loose. Name the issue that keeps you engaged. A good handbook for local organizing is Organizing for Social Change, with lots of basic how-to advice and useful copy-able forms.
(9) Plan your way out of debt. This might seem selfish as a “thing to do,” but people who are deeply in debt are enslaved. They cannot do anything except seek money to keep up with debts. Before we can assist the liberation of others, we first need to liberate ourselves. Beware. There are many debt consolidation schemes and self-serving self-help gurus out there who just want to own your debt. When the economic swan dive happens, it comes as inflation followed by deflation and joblessness. Priority of effort in debt liquidation is to pay off living space. But to get there, the first thing that has to go is credit cards… which are part of a vast criminal enterprise. A very useful guide to getting out of debt — even if it is self-help (some are put off by that) — is Carolyn White’s Debt No More.
(10) Contribute to the nearest Environmental Justice effort. Environmental Justice is a term referring to people-of-color-led fights against the targeting of poor communities as a dumping ground for the toxic effluvia of industrialism. It is the most vital and strategic anti-imperial struggle going on inside the United States. Just as the world system is comprised of an imperial core with exploitable peripheries, some of those peripheral colonies exist inside the US. Because of the structural inequalities of this core-periphery dynamic, people-of-color-led organizations like this will never have access to the same resources as white-led, or predominantly white-membership organizations. If you can’t give them volunteer time and support, send them money. A National Directory of EJ outfits is online.
(11) Conduct a banner drop. A banner drop is a tactic whereby a big cloth banner is made, then publicly opened “dropped” without prior warning, often in violation of some kind of law. If you are kind of attracted to risk, if you are an effective planner, and if you have a small, reliable crew, banner drops are a good way to learn basic, small-unit, tactical planning. If you have a crew that has done it more than once, others will rely on you as the specialists to employ this tactic as part of larger campaigns. Banners can be very simple to very fancy. Just remember that it will not stay up forever. Hostile civilians or cops will take it down by-and-by. Code Pink has actually developed a pretty good primer. Cell phones or walkie-talkies (cheap nowadays) should always be used to post lookouts at all avenues of approach into the drop site. Banners should be constructed (especially if dropping over a freeway overpass) to ensure they can’t fall and cause an accident. At rush hour, in the right place, with a website url for follow-up, this is a very effective (and kind of fun) tactic. A good crew can organize and conduct one every two weeks if they make this their raison d’etre.
(12) Make a cable access program. If local activists haven’t made use of cable access programming (television we can use!), then call the local cable access office and find out how to get on. Usually there is a small membership fee, and a moderately priced program of instruction to ensure you don’t break the stuff in the studio. If you already have cable access activists (or local independent radio), then consider developing programming for it. Ten-minute spots, 15, and for the standard a 28-minute spot. Those with good technical skills for video and audio are strongly encouraged to use those skills to get the voices of local activists and local initiatives some publicity. (You can put the audio and video you make for cable on the web too.)
(13) Get a bicycle and use it. Self explanatory. Check you local Craigslist for used bikes. It saves gas, is non-polluting, encourages others to do the same, and makes you healthy. Invest in a rear-view mirror, padded gloves, a decent helmet, and a big, international orange hunter’s vest to alert zombie drivers of your presence.
(14) Try a 100-mile diet. From the 100-mile diet site: When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically traveled at least 1,500 miles from farm to plate. That’s a total disconnection from where our food is coming from. What would it be like to eat locally for one year? Link to the site. Doing this puts you into touch with your local resources, and is a great educational tool for effective food praxis.
(15) Learn to orienteer. Orienteering can be competitive (as a sport) or recreational (more often simply called land navigation). It means learning to read topographical maps and using them in conjunction with a compass and protractor to actually navigate, on foot, over land. It is not only an invaluable skill that is quite enjoyable (if you’re the physical type), it is very important as a way-of-knowing, an epistemological framework, for anyone who might one day consider actual underground activity as part of a politics of resistance. Understanding terrain is the very basis of any science of underground/military resistance (for purely theoretical reasons, of course). There s a fine online instruction manual, but the key is to actually do it. If there are course, orienteering clubs, or someone you know who spent a good deal of time in the infantry, then find a way to get out on the ground and navigate using compass and map. As a sport, orienteering is considered a high-endurance activity that combines non-linear brain-power with great physical conditioning.
(16) Visit a Congressperson. This may sound generic; and it is. Many people have never done this, so they have this vague imagination of governance and who performs it…. which intimidates people (as it is probably meant to). Keep track of local organizing efforts on issues (now, the war), and join the next group of people who are going to visit this elected official in her/his office. They do this all the time. Going with them will be a real education, we assure you. You will not only see the actual office (generally unimpressive) and the actual person (often just as unimpressive), you will see how other interact with this rep as well as lose the feeling of being intimidated. Little known fact: Actual visits by groups of five or more people create real concern for elected officials. The American Mathematical Society (?) has a good guide for these visits. Do not use these visits to show how revolutionary you are. Others in your group may not be down for that, it doesn’t serve any purpose except to stroke one’s own ego, and it’s disrespectful of other members of your own group. If you want to be sharp with the Rep, then do so in letters or during pickets at the office (another great tactic, that we’ll fold in here).
(17) Visit a State Representative. Same as above. These folks are people you should know, write to, and visit with some frequency, or they’ll give away your figurative farm. And they can be held to higher levels of accountability because they are dependent on votes from relatively a small geographic area nearby.
(18) Learn to shoot. Don’t be afraid of firearms. Don’t be cavalier with them either. One can own, learn, and practice with firearms without joining the Male Death Cult of Amerika (MDCA). Women should know how to use firearms. Having the knowledge is putting something in the bank, so to speak, in case one is ever forced in the future to defend oneself or one’s community. Once the need arises, it is too late to acquire firearms and learn them. Movies and TV make it look easy. It is not. Unfortunately, everything that seems to be written on the subject is drenched in testosterone; so whatever one reads…. take what you need, and leave the rest. This applies to getting instruction, too. Do not purchase a firearm without studying; and to not use a firearm without training. Insurgent American will gladly respond to questions on this subject (we have a firearms person in residence, so to speak). Many colleges and universities have competitive shooting programs. This is a very good way (especially for young women) to learn with a small caliber (usually .22) weapon. Pellet rifles and pistols can be used in urban environments to maintain proficiency without shooting/scaring the neighbors.
(19) Use Social Network websites to organize. Even though many social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Cyworld, etc. are run by corporations they can still be used for positive communication and affinity group creation. Use free services in ways they are not intended. These sites can help you find others with your passion for change. Though lots of them center around hooking up and sharing embarrassing pictures you’d be amazed at how easy it is to find other serious adult radicals. Have some sort of contact with like minded people is very important. These sites can also give you another way to share your message. Don’t use just one.
(20) Back up your computer files then encrypt them. If you use a computer you create data. That data can tell others a lot about you. Even the data that sits on your personal computer and is never shared online. If you create important files about your mission protect them by making backup copies. You can burn them to CD-R, copy them to flash drives, put them on file servers, and more. Try to take copes of your data to another location besides your home. If anything were ever to happen, like a fire, you’d still have copies. Be sure you can restore your files and use them as you would the originals. If you have sensitive data you don’t want others to see, encrypt it. There’s lots of free software that will help you do this for the Mac and PC.
(21) Start a worm farm. The key to rebuilding the soil required to feed urban, suburban, and ex-urban populations in the future will be vermiculture. It is absolutely the fastest and cleanest way to rehabilitate soil that can sustainable grow food. By “farm,” we really mean a bin that can fit under your kitchen sink. It does not smell bad, is non-toxic, and it lives on kitchen scraps. Bigger bins are also do-able. If there is to be a future for modern cities after the oil crash, then that future will be predicated on Lumbricidae. Kids love these things, and they are great educational tools. They also can provide a small second income (at the right scale) to get others started, or to sell fishing bait.
(22) Become a paramedic or licensed practical nurse. One founder of this site was a Special Forces medic in the Army. He was authorized, when deployed, to do pretty much everything a doctor might do (including trauma protocols), and his training was — while very intensive — only about a year long. Anyone with a basic knowledge of anatomy and physiology, a basic familiarity with pharmacology, a broad knowledge with available references of the most common ailments, and some advanced first aid techniques can provide the vast majority of medical care required by most people most of the time. Combined with a good preventive medicine program, communities will eventually depend on these people more than a rarified supply of physicians. Learning these skills as a paramedic or practical nurse is making an investment in future communities, as well as providing an essential skill-set for future underground work (theoretically, of course).
(23) Become a gunsmith. Having and understanding firearms to defend ourselves and our communities can create another line of dependency — for the construction, maintenance, and repair of firearms. Most gunsmiths are already articulated into the social networks that include (1) law enforcement and (2) the Male Death Cult of Amerika (MDCA). It is a valuable skill in other respects, because it familiarizes the gunsmith with machine-shops that can locally manufacture lots of little thingies that autonomous communities will need. Gunsmithing is also a very well-paid craft in the general economy. There are quite a few online course, but the best training comes with resident instructors. Most community college systems have gunsmithing courses. This is strongly recommended by IA as a non-traditional craft for women as a power paradigm reversal.
(24) Design a single-residence water conservation system. A roof is a huge water collection device that is waiting ot be activated by a few modifications. Leaky things in and around the house cost hundreds of dollars a year. Non-sensored water-use appliances (like washing machines) can waste immense sums of water. Urinating outside saves a five-gallon flush. There are myriad ways to conserve water (and to more efficiently water gardens). Design your own system, and continue to build out on it. Most importantly, talk about what you are doing with others and help them get started.
(25) Host a monthly movie night. There are tons of good, thought-provoking documentary and art films that are available. There is nothing like a regular potluck get-together (dinner and a movie) to consolidate relationships and stimulate both taste buds and gray matter. Groups like the Media Education Foundation have plenty of material to get started. Even Netflix can provide plenty of films at very reasonable rental rates.
(26) Organize a community garden. Community gardens grow food and community. Get it? From the American Community Garden Association: “Community gardens exist in many urban areas, providing bits of green space amid the concrete and allowing city dwellers to reap the benefits of their labor. For a small fee, you can rent a plot for the season, and can grow whatever vegetables and annual flowers you’d like. Community gardens usually provide everything you need: garden tools, water, even expert advice! Many gardens also participate in community programs, such as Plant a Row for the Hungry. ”
(27) Join a politically acceptable church, temple, or mosque - and offer to develop a community garden. Before the secular humanists choke; let me explain, as a heathen who is about to join a church. Political acceptability is the operative term. If their program fits your values, who cares how exactly they approach the mysteries of the universe? The practice is the important thing, and it determines the ideas far more than ideas determine practice. On the issue of churches and other faith communities, let us whisper one magic word in your ear… infrastructure. Think about it. The Progressive Faith Con Blog has a very good blog roll to do some background reading.
(28) Develop and implement an energy conservation plan for your home. “To read the latest news on energy-efficient, durable, comfortable, green homes, sign up for a full membership to Home Energy Magazine online.”
(29) Conduct or attend a women’s self defense course. Unfortunately, gender as a system of social power still faces women with the ubiquitous threat of misogynistic violence. Reliance on men for “protection” is part of the whole protection-for-obedience structure of gender relations. Women need to be able to defend themselves physically, and by any means necessary. This is integral to women’s self-determination. AWARE has a very good list of links on this topic.
(30) Organize or join an effort to “opt out” of military recruitment in local schools. The No Child Left Behind Act has ordered public schools — under threat of losing federal funds — to give students’ contact information to military recruiters. There are many efforts to actively exercise the “opt out” clause on this act. Read more at the Resource Center for Nonviolence.
(31) Organize or join an effort to get public schools to dump junk food and buy/feed local, organic. “Concern about the quality and nutritional value of school foods seems to be at all-time high, and for good reason. Too many American children are obese, undernourished, suffering from diet-related diseases such as diabetes, or hungry. With diets that provide too few critical nutrients and, often, too much fat, salt and sugar, children suffer in their daily lives and in their ability to reach their full potential for health and accomplishment as adults.” Read more.
(32) Organize or join an effort to stop high-stakes testing in schools. Only for the stout-hearted who are ready for a long fight. But the stakes are indeed very high. Read this. Children in public schools are not being given the capacity to think, but to conform. And they are being “sorted” in the process.
(33) Use the closest farmers market. Self explanatory. Look it up on the web. This supports local growers and keeps monetary resources closer to your community instead of drifting up into the coffers of the multinationals. It is the first step toward developing a community supported agricultural (CSA) system.
(34) Organize a regular intercultural cook-on-site potluck. Intentionally sharing traditional skills for cooking meals and sharing food across cultural lines is a very good community builder. If there is more than one language involved, ensure there is translation available. Music and dance can be served up the same way, as a teaching-learning dialectic, often with the food.
(35) Contribute volunteer time to a local rape and domestic abuse hotline or shelter. Self explanatory. The left has been AWOL on this issue, and no movement worthy of the name can ever again ignore that women, more than half the population, face widespread, violent, and systemic abuse most frequently in their homes and with their “intimates.” The oppression of women is paradigmatic — seen as “conquest” — for the “conquest” of colonies (imperialism) and the “conquest” of nature (ecocide). Gender as a system of social power must be confronted at its roots, and broken. These facilities and services are the front lines.
(2) Take “one more step” to oppose militarism. If you are not sporting a button or bumper sticker against the war, then start doing that. if you’re doing that, but not writing — Congress, letters to the editor, op-eds, email lists — then start writing. If you’re doing that, then give money to an antiwar effort. If you’re doing that, then start to attend local meetings. You get the idea. Take just one more step. Stopping this war will have unimaginably good ripple effects and empower all people’s movements everywhere. More ideas and up-to-date info at Bring Them Home Now!
(3) Create a blog. Blogs can be a lot more than vanity sites. They are a form of democratic communication that allow us all to be simultaneous teachers and learners, and they increase the density and survival redundancy of our communications networks. They are communications infrastructure. More blogs, more links, more sharing, more community, better coordination. Basic Blogging for Women is very helpful, for everyone, and we can also open a discussion thread here at the IA forums.
(4) Commit to study. One of the most common — and in our opinion, flawed — complaints we hear among activists and frustrated, impatient political junkies, is that there is too much writing and discussion and not enough action. Here’s what we have to say about that. Nonsense! Human agency is not simply in outwardly messing around with one’s environment. It is being a conscious agent of change. If we are walking around blindfolded, we are taking action; but if we want that action to be efficacious, then we need to see, figuratively speaking. Studying is a critical form of action. Commit to study something new, and expand your understanding of a topic or issue every chance you get. The criticality of this is the reason we include our Analysis-Synthesis section here at IA. New situations require new actions, which require new forms of understanding.
(5) Surf the Web Anonymously Its a good idea to put a layer of protection between you and the world online. One way to-do this is by creating a free email account and not associating your own name with it. Create a online handle and use that instead of your real name. Another way is by using a Proxy Server to anonymise your web surfing. Torpark is a free Windows application that can help you do this. For more information about surfing the web anonymously check out Tor from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Remember Nothing on the web is completly anonymous. If someone has the resources they can find out anthing they want. We can make it a lot harder for them though.
(6) Learn to fix something new. Divesting of our dependency means becoming better McGivers. We have to learn how stuff works, and how to tinker with it. Our dependency rest in large part on the idea that every tiny task is subdivided our to an expert, who we pay to do it for us. That means we have to have money, and we know where that goes. Our own experience is that learning to tinker with one thing gives us insights on how to tinker with a lot of things. Learn something new on a schedule. Commit to learn how to fix something new every month, every six months, no matter. Whatever works for you. How to change the rings in a leaky faucet. How to change a tire. How to caulk a bathtub. How to built a live trap for rabbits or a bird house. Anything. The Bob Vila site has all sorts of good advice on this.
(7) Start an email list. This can be a simple one-way list to which you send out things; or it can be a listserv, that functions as a discussion group. FIRST LAW… make your first message one that asks everyone if it’s okay, and says how often you will post. People hate spam. Get their permission, and if they ask to be removed, do so without hesitation of complaint. Use blind courtesy copy (BCC) to put people’s email addresses in, so their addresses aren’t shared with the world. Once established, lists are a very important way to develop corporate media bypasses. Caution: Avoid sharing whole articles on lists… just teasers that suggest what the piece is about, followed with a link. Library Support Staff has a good site on this.
(8) Join a local organizing effort. Working with people from your same geographic area is the absolute most effective and sustainable way to do social change action. Not only does the geographic proximity make meeting more do-able, people build actual friendships that way, and organizations that are bound by real friendship are both durable and cohesive. If you live in a metro area, look in the “community calendar” sections of your free entertainment weekly. One can also use the internet to find groups working nearby. Don’t use the term “progressive” in your search parameters, however. It’s in a lot of corporate names, and the meaning of that term is very loose. Name the issue that keeps you engaged. A good handbook for local organizing is Organizing for Social Change, with lots of basic how-to advice and useful copy-able forms.
(9) Plan your way out of debt. This might seem selfish as a “thing to do,” but people who are deeply in debt are enslaved. They cannot do anything except seek money to keep up with debts. Before we can assist the liberation of others, we first need to liberate ourselves. Beware. There are many debt consolidation schemes and self-serving self-help gurus out there who just want to own your debt. When the economic swan dive happens, it comes as inflation followed by deflation and joblessness. Priority of effort in debt liquidation is to pay off living space. But to get there, the first thing that has to go is credit cards… which are part of a vast criminal enterprise. A very useful guide to getting out of debt — even if it is self-help (some are put off by that) — is Carolyn White’s Debt No More.
(10) Contribute to the nearest Environmental Justice effort. Environmental Justice is a term referring to people-of-color-led fights against the targeting of poor communities as a dumping ground for the toxic effluvia of industrialism. It is the most vital and strategic anti-imperial struggle going on inside the United States. Just as the world system is comprised of an imperial core with exploitable peripheries, some of those peripheral colonies exist inside the US. Because of the structural inequalities of this core-periphery dynamic, people-of-color-led organizations like this will never have access to the same resources as white-led, or predominantly white-membership organizations. If you can’t give them volunteer time and support, send them money. A National Directory of EJ outfits is online.
(11) Conduct a banner drop. A banner drop is a tactic whereby a big cloth banner is made, then publicly opened “dropped” without prior warning, often in violation of some kind of law. If you are kind of attracted to risk, if you are an effective planner, and if you have a small, reliable crew, banner drops are a good way to learn basic, small-unit, tactical planning. If you have a crew that has done it more than once, others will rely on you as the specialists to employ this tactic as part of larger campaigns. Banners can be very simple to very fancy. Just remember that it will not stay up forever. Hostile civilians or cops will take it down by-and-by. Code Pink has actually developed a pretty good primer. Cell phones or walkie-talkies (cheap nowadays) should always be used to post lookouts at all avenues of approach into the drop site. Banners should be constructed (especially if dropping over a freeway overpass) to ensure they can’t fall and cause an accident. At rush hour, in the right place, with a website url for follow-up, this is a very effective (and kind of fun) tactic. A good crew can organize and conduct one every two weeks if they make this their raison d’etre.
(12) Make a cable access program. If local activists haven’t made use of cable access programming (television we can use!), then call the local cable access office and find out how to get on. Usually there is a small membership fee, and a moderately priced program of instruction to ensure you don’t break the stuff in the studio. If you already have cable access activists (or local independent radio), then consider developing programming for it. Ten-minute spots, 15, and for the standard a 28-minute spot. Those with good technical skills for video and audio are strongly encouraged to use those skills to get the voices of local activists and local initiatives some publicity. (You can put the audio and video you make for cable on the web too.)
(13) Get a bicycle and use it. Self explanatory. Check you local Craigslist for used bikes. It saves gas, is non-polluting, encourages others to do the same, and makes you healthy. Invest in a rear-view mirror, padded gloves, a decent helmet, and a big, international orange hunter’s vest to alert zombie drivers of your presence.
(14) Try a 100-mile diet. From the 100-mile diet site: When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically traveled at least 1,500 miles from farm to plate. That’s a total disconnection from where our food is coming from. What would it be like to eat locally for one year? Link to the site. Doing this puts you into touch with your local resources, and is a great educational tool for effective food praxis.
(15) Learn to orienteer. Orienteering can be competitive (as a sport) or recreational (more often simply called land navigation). It means learning to read topographical maps and using them in conjunction with a compass and protractor to actually navigate, on foot, over land. It is not only an invaluable skill that is quite enjoyable (if you’re the physical type), it is very important as a way-of-knowing, an epistemological framework, for anyone who might one day consider actual underground activity as part of a politics of resistance. Understanding terrain is the very basis of any science of underground/military resistance (for purely theoretical reasons, of course). There s a fine online instruction manual, but the key is to actually do it. If there are course, orienteering clubs, or someone you know who spent a good deal of time in the infantry, then find a way to get out on the ground and navigate using compass and map. As a sport, orienteering is considered a high-endurance activity that combines non-linear brain-power with great physical conditioning.
(16) Visit a Congressperson. This may sound generic; and it is. Many people have never done this, so they have this vague imagination of governance and who performs it…. which intimidates people (as it is probably meant to). Keep track of local organizing efforts on issues (now, the war), and join the next group of people who are going to visit this elected official in her/his office. They do this all the time. Going with them will be a real education, we assure you. You will not only see the actual office (generally unimpressive) and the actual person (often just as unimpressive), you will see how other interact with this rep as well as lose the feeling of being intimidated. Little known fact: Actual visits by groups of five or more people create real concern for elected officials. The American Mathematical Society (?) has a good guide for these visits. Do not use these visits to show how revolutionary you are. Others in your group may not be down for that, it doesn’t serve any purpose except to stroke one’s own ego, and it’s disrespectful of other members of your own group. If you want to be sharp with the Rep, then do so in letters or during pickets at the office (another great tactic, that we’ll fold in here).
(17) Visit a State Representative. Same as above. These folks are people you should know, write to, and visit with some frequency, or they’ll give away your figurative farm. And they can be held to higher levels of accountability because they are dependent on votes from relatively a small geographic area nearby.
(18) Learn to shoot. Don’t be afraid of firearms. Don’t be cavalier with them either. One can own, learn, and practice with firearms without joining the Male Death Cult of Amerika (MDCA). Women should know how to use firearms. Having the knowledge is putting something in the bank, so to speak, in case one is ever forced in the future to defend oneself or one’s community. Once the need arises, it is too late to acquire firearms and learn them. Movies and TV make it look easy. It is not. Unfortunately, everything that seems to be written on the subject is drenched in testosterone; so whatever one reads…. take what you need, and leave the rest. This applies to getting instruction, too. Do not purchase a firearm without studying; and to not use a firearm without training. Insurgent American will gladly respond to questions on this subject (we have a firearms person in residence, so to speak). Many colleges and universities have competitive shooting programs. This is a very good way (especially for young women) to learn with a small caliber (usually .22) weapon. Pellet rifles and pistols can be used in urban environments to maintain proficiency without shooting/scaring the neighbors.
(19) Use Social Network websites to organize. Even though many social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Cyworld, etc. are run by corporations they can still be used for positive communication and affinity group creation. Use free services in ways they are not intended. These sites can help you find others with your passion for change. Though lots of them center around hooking up and sharing embarrassing pictures you’d be amazed at how easy it is to find other serious adult radicals. Have some sort of contact with like minded people is very important. These sites can also give you another way to share your message. Don’t use just one.
(20) Back up your computer files then encrypt them. If you use a computer you create data. That data can tell others a lot about you. Even the data that sits on your personal computer and is never shared online. If you create important files about your mission protect them by making backup copies. You can burn them to CD-R, copy them to flash drives, put them on file servers, and more. Try to take copes of your data to another location besides your home. If anything were ever to happen, like a fire, you’d still have copies. Be sure you can restore your files and use them as you would the originals. If you have sensitive data you don’t want others to see, encrypt it. There’s lots of free software that will help you do this for the Mac and PC.
(21) Start a worm farm. The key to rebuilding the soil required to feed urban, suburban, and ex-urban populations in the future will be vermiculture. It is absolutely the fastest and cleanest way to rehabilitate soil that can sustainable grow food. By “farm,” we really mean a bin that can fit under your kitchen sink. It does not smell bad, is non-toxic, and it lives on kitchen scraps. Bigger bins are also do-able. If there is to be a future for modern cities after the oil crash, then that future will be predicated on Lumbricidae. Kids love these things, and they are great educational tools. They also can provide a small second income (at the right scale) to get others started, or to sell fishing bait.
(22) Become a paramedic or licensed practical nurse. One founder of this site was a Special Forces medic in the Army. He was authorized, when deployed, to do pretty much everything a doctor might do (including trauma protocols), and his training was — while very intensive — only about a year long. Anyone with a basic knowledge of anatomy and physiology, a basic familiarity with pharmacology, a broad knowledge with available references of the most common ailments, and some advanced first aid techniques can provide the vast majority of medical care required by most people most of the time. Combined with a good preventive medicine program, communities will eventually depend on these people more than a rarified supply of physicians. Learning these skills as a paramedic or practical nurse is making an investment in future communities, as well as providing an essential skill-set for future underground work (theoretically, of course).
(23) Become a gunsmith. Having and understanding firearms to defend ourselves and our communities can create another line of dependency — for the construction, maintenance, and repair of firearms. Most gunsmiths are already articulated into the social networks that include (1) law enforcement and (2) the Male Death Cult of Amerika (MDCA). It is a valuable skill in other respects, because it familiarizes the gunsmith with machine-shops that can locally manufacture lots of little thingies that autonomous communities will need. Gunsmithing is also a very well-paid craft in the general economy. There are quite a few online course, but the best training comes with resident instructors. Most community college systems have gunsmithing courses. This is strongly recommended by IA as a non-traditional craft for women as a power paradigm reversal.
(24) Design a single-residence water conservation system. A roof is a huge water collection device that is waiting ot be activated by a few modifications. Leaky things in and around the house cost hundreds of dollars a year. Non-sensored water-use appliances (like washing machines) can waste immense sums of water. Urinating outside saves a five-gallon flush. There are myriad ways to conserve water (and to more efficiently water gardens). Design your own system, and continue to build out on it. Most importantly, talk about what you are doing with others and help them get started.
(25) Host a monthly movie night. There are tons of good, thought-provoking documentary and art films that are available. There is nothing like a regular potluck get-together (dinner and a movie) to consolidate relationships and stimulate both taste buds and gray matter. Groups like the Media Education Foundation have plenty of material to get started. Even Netflix can provide plenty of films at very reasonable rental rates.
(26) Organize a community garden. Community gardens grow food and community. Get it? From the American Community Garden Association: “Community gardens exist in many urban areas, providing bits of green space amid the concrete and allowing city dwellers to reap the benefits of their labor. For a small fee, you can rent a plot for the season, and can grow whatever vegetables and annual flowers you’d like. Community gardens usually provide everything you need: garden tools, water, even expert advice! Many gardens also participate in community programs, such as Plant a Row for the Hungry. ”
(27) Join a politically acceptable church, temple, or mosque - and offer to develop a community garden. Before the secular humanists choke; let me explain, as a heathen who is about to join a church. Political acceptability is the operative term. If their program fits your values, who cares how exactly they approach the mysteries of the universe? The practice is the important thing, and it determines the ideas far more than ideas determine practice. On the issue of churches and other faith communities, let us whisper one magic word in your ear… infrastructure. Think about it. The Progressive Faith Con Blog has a very good blog roll to do some background reading.
(28) Develop and implement an energy conservation plan for your home. “To read the latest news on energy-efficient, durable, comfortable, green homes, sign up for a full membership to Home Energy Magazine online.”
(29) Conduct or attend a women’s self defense course. Unfortunately, gender as a system of social power still faces women with the ubiquitous threat of misogynistic violence. Reliance on men for “protection” is part of the whole protection-for-obedience structure of gender relations. Women need to be able to defend themselves physically, and by any means necessary. This is integral to women’s self-determination. AWARE has a very good list of links on this topic.
(30) Organize or join an effort to “opt out” of military recruitment in local schools. The No Child Left Behind Act has ordered public schools — under threat of losing federal funds — to give students’ contact information to military recruiters. There are many efforts to actively exercise the “opt out” clause on this act. Read more at the Resource Center for Nonviolence.
(31) Organize or join an effort to get public schools to dump junk food and buy/feed local, organic. “Concern about the quality and nutritional value of school foods seems to be at all-time high, and for good reason. Too many American children are obese, undernourished, suffering from diet-related diseases such as diabetes, or hungry. With diets that provide too few critical nutrients and, often, too much fat, salt and sugar, children suffer in their daily lives and in their ability to reach their full potential for health and accomplishment as adults.” Read more.
(32) Organize or join an effort to stop high-stakes testing in schools. Only for the stout-hearted who are ready for a long fight. But the stakes are indeed very high. Read this. Children in public schools are not being given the capacity to think, but to conform. And they are being “sorted” in the process.
(33) Use the closest farmers market. Self explanatory. Look it up on the web. This supports local growers and keeps monetary resources closer to your community instead of drifting up into the coffers of the multinationals. It is the first step toward developing a community supported agricultural (CSA) system.
(34) Organize a regular intercultural cook-on-site potluck. Intentionally sharing traditional skills for cooking meals and sharing food across cultural lines is a very good community builder. If there is more than one language involved, ensure there is translation available. Music and dance can be served up the same way, as a teaching-learning dialectic, often with the food.
(35) Contribute volunteer time to a local rape and domestic abuse hotline or shelter. Self explanatory. The left has been AWOL on this issue, and no movement worthy of the name can ever again ignore that women, more than half the population, face widespread, violent, and systemic abuse most frequently in their homes and with their “intimates.” The oppression of women is paradigmatic — seen as “conquest” — for the “conquest” of colonies (imperialism) and the “conquest” of nature (ecocide). Gender as a system of social power must be confronted at its roots, and broken. These facilities and services are the front lines.
Monday, August 20, 2007
U.S. Media Ignores Estimate of 1 Million Iraqi Deaths
Yesterday a radio interviewer in South Africa asked me what had been the response of the "mainstream media in the United States" to Just Foreign Policy's ongoing estimate of the Iraqi death toll from the U.S. invasion and occupation, which on Thursday crossed the one million mark.
Sadly, I had to report that it has been ignored by mainstream media, even the wire services. But this is hardly surprising. A main motivation for constructing the web counter was to keep the "Lancet study" alive. The "Lancet study," you'll recall, was a study published last fall in the British medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. The media largely buried the Lancet study when it was published - and have largely ignored the question of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion - so it's little surprise that they have ignored our attempt to shine a light on this question.
The Lancet study is the only existing study that uses the method accepted all over the world for estimating deaths due to large-scale violent conflict: a cluster survey. Its principal deficit for understanding the current situation is that the survey it was based on is now a year old, so that when people want to invoke the Lancet study to describe the death toll, they are likely to say, "a year ago the death toll was over 600,000" - leaving out what has happened since. Since the Lancet study is "old news," it's progressively easier to ignore it over time. It was this problem that gave us the idea of constructing an ongoing, rough update.
The tally of deaths reported in the Western media by Iraq Body Count, although it gives an inaccurate picture of the overall death toll, does have the advantage that it is regularly updated. So while the Iraq Body Count tally, by itself, doesn't help us understand the overall death toll, it does give us some information about the trend over time, because one can compare, for example, the Iraq Body Count tally today with the Iraq Body Count tally from July 2006.
Thus, we constructed our ongoing online estimate - for which we provide the code so you can include it on your own web page - by extrapolating from the Lancet estimate using the trend provided by Iraq Body Count.
Our extrapolation assumes that Iraq Body Count is capturing a fixed proportion of the true level of deaths over time. This is a conservative assumption, because it is likely that Iraq Body Count is capturing a smaller share of the true death toll over time, as reporting from Iraq becomes progressively more difficult. By assuming that Iraq Body Count captures a constant share, we will tend to underestimate the true death toll.
Note that the number we focus on is the Lancet estimate of excess deaths due to violence. Thus, we understate the death toll by ignoring, say, increased deaths due to cholera which could be attributed, at least in part, to the destruction resulting from the U.S. invasion and occupation.
Note further that a straight-line extrapolation from the Lancet study - ignoring any increase in the death rate in the last year from the average between March, 2003 and July, 2006 - an average that includes the first year of the occupation, when by all accounts the death rate was lower - would still result in more than 750,000 excess deaths due to violence.
Increasingly, the U.S. occupation is described as a passive onlooker to the violence. This is deeply misleading for two reasons. First, the civil war - or civil wars - that have been unleashed in Iraq was a predictable - and predicted - result of the U.S. invasion. Everything is predicted if one searches enough, but in this case, for example, James Baker gave the threat of unleashing a civil war as a key reason why the U.S. didn't go to Baghdad in 1991, so it's absurd to treat this as an unforeseeable consequence. Second, the picture is being obscured by underreporting in the U.S. of deaths from U.S. air strikes, raids, and shooting at checkpoints.
Why does this matter? Obviously, we have a responsibility to understand the world as best we can, and nowhere is this responsibility greater than in trying to understand the consequences of the actions of our government. But the question is particularly urgent, because there is a major effort underway to rehabilitate the war politically, by cherry-picking - and misinterpreting - current developments. The surge is working, we are told: it must be given more time. If the scale of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion becomes part of the debate, this sleight-of-hand will be much harder to maintain.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
www.milfuegos.net
NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President and Vice President.
Sadly, I had to report that it has been ignored by mainstream media, even the wire services. But this is hardly surprising. A main motivation for constructing the web counter was to keep the "Lancet study" alive. The "Lancet study," you'll recall, was a study published last fall in the British medical journal The Lancet, which estimated that more than 600,000 Iraqis had had been killed as a result of the invasion as of July 2006. The media largely buried the Lancet study when it was published - and have largely ignored the question of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion - so it's little surprise that they have ignored our attempt to shine a light on this question.
The Lancet study is the only existing study that uses the method accepted all over the world for estimating deaths due to large-scale violent conflict: a cluster survey. Its principal deficit for understanding the current situation is that the survey it was based on is now a year old, so that when people want to invoke the Lancet study to describe the death toll, they are likely to say, "a year ago the death toll was over 600,000" - leaving out what has happened since. Since the Lancet study is "old news," it's progressively easier to ignore it over time. It was this problem that gave us the idea of constructing an ongoing, rough update.
The tally of deaths reported in the Western media by Iraq Body Count, although it gives an inaccurate picture of the overall death toll, does have the advantage that it is regularly updated. So while the Iraq Body Count tally, by itself, doesn't help us understand the overall death toll, it does give us some information about the trend over time, because one can compare, for example, the Iraq Body Count tally today with the Iraq Body Count tally from July 2006.
Thus, we constructed our ongoing online estimate - for which we provide the code so you can include it on your own web page - by extrapolating from the Lancet estimate using the trend provided by Iraq Body Count.
Our extrapolation assumes that Iraq Body Count is capturing a fixed proportion of the true level of deaths over time. This is a conservative assumption, because it is likely that Iraq Body Count is capturing a smaller share of the true death toll over time, as reporting from Iraq becomes progressively more difficult. By assuming that Iraq Body Count captures a constant share, we will tend to underestimate the true death toll.
Note that the number we focus on is the Lancet estimate of excess deaths due to violence. Thus, we understate the death toll by ignoring, say, increased deaths due to cholera which could be attributed, at least in part, to the destruction resulting from the U.S. invasion and occupation.
Note further that a straight-line extrapolation from the Lancet study - ignoring any increase in the death rate in the last year from the average between March, 2003 and July, 2006 - an average that includes the first year of the occupation, when by all accounts the death rate was lower - would still result in more than 750,000 excess deaths due to violence.
Increasingly, the U.S. occupation is described as a passive onlooker to the violence. This is deeply misleading for two reasons. First, the civil war - or civil wars - that have been unleashed in Iraq was a predictable - and predicted - result of the U.S. invasion. Everything is predicted if one searches enough, but in this case, for example, James Baker gave the threat of unleashing a civil war as a key reason why the U.S. didn't go to Baghdad in 1991, so it's absurd to treat this as an unforeseeable consequence. Second, the picture is being obscured by underreporting in the U.S. of deaths from U.S. air strikes, raids, and shooting at checkpoints.
Why does this matter? Obviously, we have a responsibility to understand the world as best we can, and nowhere is this responsibility greater than in trying to understand the consequences of the actions of our government. But the question is particularly urgent, because there is a major effort underway to rehabilitate the war politically, by cherry-picking - and misinterpreting - current developments. The surge is working, we are told: it must be given more time. If the scale of the overall death toll from the U.S. invasion becomes part of the debate, this sleight-of-hand will be much harder to maintain.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
www.milfuegos.net
NOTICE: Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agency may have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice. They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight. You have no recourse nor protection save to call for the impeachment of the current President and Vice President.
Breaking the Chains, A Review of Henry Giroux’s The University in Chains: Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex
by Scott D. Morris / August 18th, 2007
“Of all the enemies of public liberty war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
– James Madison, “Political Observations,” 1795
“God is pro-war”
–Jerry Falwell, 2004
The ways in which a stark and dreadful militarization permeates and impacts US and global culture is evidenced by even a cursory examination of recent news reports and events. For example, the film “300,” a xenophobic celebration of hyper-masculine militarized mass killing and brutality, was the number one DVD rental last week1; “The Bourne Ultimatum,” a film rooted in CIA torture, deceit, assassination and espionage, was last week’s top grossing box-office film2; Congressional Research Reports for the People estimates Congress has approved roughly $610 billion for the military operations instituted since 9/113; the House approved a $459.6 billion Pentagon budget for 2008 (not including supplemental spending on Iraq and Afghanistan or nuclear weapons programs through the DOE that would push the figure well-beyond $600 billion)4; Just Foreign Policy reported one million Iraqis killed (as of August 11, 2007) as a consequence of the US aggression initiated in March 20035; The New Yorker’s most read online article last week was “The Black Sites: a rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program6; the Air Force announced that “hunter-killer” unmanned drones “loaded” with “a ton and a half of guided missiles and bombs, known as ‘The Reaper,’” will soon be headed to the grim killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan7; “Operation Straight Up,” a right-wing apocalyptic Christian evangelical troupe, will embark on a Defense Department endorsed “Military Crusade in Iraq,” to push “End Times theology” on US troops and deliver “an encouraging word from God to press on to victory8; the Bush Administration proposed to send $63 billion in military aid and weapons to the most volatile region in the world, the Middle East9; the Senate passed an enhanced surveillance bill that includes few safeguards to protect US citizens from spying while oversight is placed into the hands of Bush Administration henchmen Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, and sycophant Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, etc., etc., etc.
This creeping militarization across economics, religion, politics and culture functions as a form of public pedagogy that conditions and directs our values, attitudes, beliefs, desires, allegiances, identities and identifications and is thus a matter of serious interest for those concerned about public education, the direction of knowledge, and meaningful democratic politics in their wider applications. The penetration of matters military into all corners of our social and cultural lives C. Wright Mills referred to as “military metaphysics — the cast of mind that defines . . . reality as basically military.”
When our reality and “cast of mind” is essentially defined militarily, how, we might ask, are we impacted as political, social, intellectual and cultural beings? How can we engage this “military metaphysics” in ways that aid us in developing tools for thinking critically about the causes, agents and effects of militarism, and the concomitant forces of capitalist corporatism, and, more importantly, how can we use that critical understanding toward collective work that will transform the institutions responsible for the militarization and corporatization of US politics and culture? That militarization and corporatism will impact our political and personal lives in multiple ways, perhaps critical, is a stark and inescapable reality that must be confronted, sooner rather than later, with all of our intellectual, moral and political energy. These issues and questions, and much more, are at the core of Henry Giroux’s latest book The University in Chains, a rigorous interrogation and relentless critique of the corporate, military and right-wing forces assaulting the academy (and beyond) in the United States, as well as an insightful and imaginative explication of how we might take-on the challenge of developing a meaningful democratic political culture and substantive democratic public spheres as part of a larger collective project dedicated to transforming the conditions and institutions that currently dominate so much, and threaten so many, of our lives.
Many readers will find it surprising that what they consider a bastion of free inquiry, objective thought and unbiased research, i.e. the university system, is a key institution in US culture in which this “military metaphysics” is increasingly present and influential; it is becoming, in John Armitage’s apt phrase, a “hypermodern militarized knowledge factory.”10 The militarizing factory system of university education not only includes “150 military education institutions in the United States” but also hundreds of university sites in which richly Pentagon-funded and directed research and development is pursued, military personnel (and others) develop the values and tools of the “warfare state,” and students undertake programs of study in preparation for service to “departments and agencies” of the warrior state.
The Association of American Universities has argued, “The nation must cultivate young talent and orient national economic, political, and education systems” to achieve the mutually linked goals of expanding global markets for US corporations and for victory in the war on terrorism.11 That this pursuit of military superiority and corporate domination through the university system of research and development goes largely unchallenged by academics, as well as society in general, should be a source of profound concern and pointed critique.
The militarization of the university is present in many guises. For example, former CIA director and president of Texas A&M, and current Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, is just one small indicator of how the “US security state” (a nexus of political, military and corporate power and interests) is penetrating the university system. Giroux shares a telling anecdote from Cary Nelson who was asked by the UCSD provost, a former CIA employee, during an evaluation of the English Department, “if it were true the literature department would only hire communist faculty?” The question was not a joke! Nor is it a joke, as noted by the Wall Street Journal, that the CIA has become a “growing force on campus,” or that FBI director Robert Mueller has a desire “to foster exchanges between academia and the FBI,” or, how “the secrecy imposed on scholars working for the CIA” sabotages interrogation of prevailing notions, critiques of conventional wisdom, and challenges to power and authority and thus is “antithetical to the notion of the university as a democratic sphere” dedicated to critical debate, discussion and dialogue.
But why is it a problem if professors and universities are in league with US intelligence agencies and the militarized state? Should not the university be disciplined in a post 9/11 world to produce a public discourse in support of US domination of the globe through military might, the eradication of a socialist leaning New Deal society, and encourage a blurring between church and state,” all in the name of freedom of inquiry and the spread of democracy? While some do believe the university should “be disciplined” in these directions (witness ACTA — the right-wing “American Council of Trustees” — and their denunciation of the academy as a “weak link” in the war on terror, the recent firing of Ward Churchill, or, the Senate Committee bill passed in Arizona that calls for a $500 fine if professors are caught “advocating one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy,” etc.), Giroux describes how this marriage between the academy and the militarized state surrenders “the idea of the university as a site of critical dialogue and debate, public service and socially responsible research” to the pursuit of military aggression, profit enhancement, right-wing ideologies and global political and economic power.
In short, the university as an institution potentially dedicated to a substantive democratic culture, critical inquiry and the public good is transmogrified into a repressive sycophant “complicit with a larger set of institutional…commitments to war, violence, fear, surveillance, and the erosion of civic society . . .” Given this “clash of imperatives,” we should consider “what the role of higher education might be [or should be]” when “the government has a free hand to do whatever it wants in the name of national security,” (Dave Price)12 and reflect on how we might guard intellectual and moral integrity.
President Eisenhower’s oft-cited 1961 warning that “we must guard against . . . the military-industrial complex . . . [because] the disastrous rise of misplaced power . . . will . . . endanger our liberties [and] democratic processes,” also included a call to protect the universities from the stark evils of militarization. Eisenhower feared that war and violence would become the organizing principle of society and thus threaten not only democracy but the very idea of, and occasion for, politics. If politics, in brief, is defined as the way we organize ourselves in society around matters of human life, but we develop a society rooted in “military metaphysics” that is dominated by and organized around militarization, i.e. a dreadful structural machine that functions largely to produce profits, death and destruction, we undermine our possibilities for enhancing and protecting human life and thus destroy the possibility of real politics.
Before delivery, Eisenhower excised the phrase “military-industrial-academic complex” from his speech, but still warned that “the free university . . . free ideas and scientific discovery” as well as “intellectual curiosity” were threatened by “the power of money” working in the interest of the militarization of US society and profits for the arms industry. Senator William Fulbright retrieved the excised phrase later in the 1960s, at the height of the US attack on Vietnam, and noted how “the university fails its higher purpose” if it surrenders to the federal government’s pursuit of militarization and the corporate pursuit of profits. “The fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the military-industrial-complex,” about which Eisenhower and Fulbright warned has, unfortunately, continued to penetrate all corners of US culture, including the academy. Higher education has become an institution “that actively embrace[s] multiple constituencies and forms of patronage provided by the federal government, military, and corporate interests,” three essentially authoritarian structures subversive of democracy.
While it seems clear that values promoting substantive democratic practices and structures along with a democratic public spirit should be at the core of university and public education, “few in power,” in Andrew Bacevich’s words, “have openly considered whether…cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles.” One suspects those in power have other interests to occupy their time. Those other interests include producing an authoritarian politics, privatizing the economy, and employing and expanding an aggressive military machine that develop ever greater control and influence over who lives and who dies, and who wins and who loses, along with increased powers to exclude or include, to eviscerate civil rights, and to subvert democratic social values. Giroux argues persuasively that totalitarian power is becoming the norm in the US “as life is more ruthlessly regulated and increasingly placed in the hands of military and state power.”
One consequence of this accelerated militarization is a dual politics of disposability “shaped by the forces of empire,” witnessed on the one hand in “legalized” abuse, torture, rendition and murder, and on the other hand in the impunity from punishment enjoyed by those responsible for these brutal policies. In short, power brings impunity, and impunity protects power.
Under conditions in which militarism and war serve as structuring forces in the society, violence, militarization and aggression, at least for the rulers, functions as “a source of pride rather than alarm.” We should consider the impact on the rest of us when, in Michael Geyer’s words, “civil society organizes itself for the production of violence.” Across US culture, in multiple representational forms ranging from video games, to Internet sites, to films, to television programs, to advertisements, Giroux notes, “hyper-violence provides the organizing optic…while legitimating the fascistic assumption that violence is the only reasonable solution to all . . . problems.” A culture so rich in death tends to treat life very cheaply, as perversely seen in the horrible treatment of injured US soldiers returning from Iraq who are kept in rooms that include “mold, rot, mice and cockroaches” and grimly in what Bob Herbert calls “the apocalypse in Baghdad.”
A number of questions arise: How do we work through the tension between public opinions and attitudes that are generally opposed to military aggression, torture and mass violence, and the increasing militarization of “values, practices, ideologies, social relations and cultural representations” that works to not only merge politics and violence, but recode our memories and direct our experiences? How do we reverse the transition from the “welfare state,” that at least recognizes some notion of a social contract in which we are responsible for one another, to the “warfare state,” that thwarts dissent, debilitates public debate, enforces moral absolutes, celebrates aggression, and thus undermines participatory democracy? How do we overcome the capacity of the militarized state to both create “a disconnected hardening of individuals to suffering,” and to erase from view the massive trauma, brutality and barbaric destruction imposed by the US machine of death abroad? What is the proper response among academics when dissent is seen as unpatriotic and critical citizenship is considered treasonous under conditions in which militarism conditions and directs not only our perceptions of reality but the ways in which we relate with that reality?
These and other questions, offered or intimated by Giroux, must be critically engaged during a historical period in which the United States spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined, is the world’s greatest purveyor of deadly arms, is dedicated to illegal military aggression against anyone, anytime and anywhere, and is “enthralled with [a] military power [that] has become central to our national identity,” while our massive arsenal of highly destructive weapons signifies “who we are and what we stand for.” (Bacevich)
Nick Turse reports that roughly “350 colleges and universities conduct Pentagon funded research.” The Pentagon’s economic and ideological power “can often dictate the sorts of research that get undertaken and the sorts that don’t.” Giroux refers to the enormous power and burgeoning budget of the Pentagon’s military apparatus as possessing a “powerful arm-twisting ability capable of bending higher education to its will,” that is an “ominous and largely ignored disaster in the making . . . ” In short, because of Pentagon power within the academy there is a dedication toward “delivering science and technology solutions to the warfighter.” For example, in 2003 Penn State received $149 million from “the military war machine,” for research and development, while the University of Texas received $87 million, and Carnegie Mellon $60 million often to support research in space-based weapons systems, including “microwave guns, space-based lasers, electromagnetic guns, and holographic decoys,” and Future Combat Systems such as “electric tanks, electro-thermal chemical cannons, [and] unmanned platforms.” (Jay Reed)
Giroux suggests that those working in the “hypermodern militarized knowledge factories” should ask a number of critical and ‘uncomfortable” questions: “What role do intellectuals play in the conditions that allow theory and knowledge to be appropriated [ . . . in ways that] produce lethal weapons, fuel an arms race . . . and corrupt ethical standards…and what can they do politically to prevent [ . . . their work] from being militarized . . .?” And crucially, how do opposition and resistance to militarization in the academy “connect to [public intellectual] work and extend [students’ and teachers’] sense of social and political responsibility to the world outside of the academy?” One vital task for intellectuals is to employ critical pedagogical practices that promote ethical citizenship, encourage a willingness to take risks and responsibilities for a more substantive democracy, and “connect knowledge and power in the interests of social responsibility and justice.”
The University in Chains, is an intellectually rigorous and politically challenging contribution to our understanding of US culture, US politics and US education in our increasingly (and dangerously) militarized society and world, and a careful examination of the ways in which the capitalist market, the Pentagon-system, and right-wing fundamentalism corrupt and condition the academy and culture. The University in Chains is a stunning tour-de-force that meticulously examines how the multi-tiered and interpenetrating military, corporate and right-wing assaults on the university undermine higher education as a potentially and necessary democratic public sphere in which students and teachers could, and should, develop a sense of individual and social agency in the context of experiencing meaningful democratic social relations while identifying, critiquing and working to overcome authoritarian forms of power and authority.
Giroux writes with a clarity and urgency that is riveting and engaging. He operates from a fundamental recognition, “the academy and democracy are in peril,” and from a decisive question, “What is the task of educators at a time when the forces of democracy appear to be in retreat and the emerging ideologies and practices of militarization, corporatism, and political fundamentalism bear down on every aspect of individual and collective experience?” In other words, what are the responsibilities of public intellectuals during a period in which critical thought, rational considerations, radical qualities of character, and a culture of questioning, all necessary to authentic higher education and intellectual creativity, are under assault by corporate, religious, ideological and economic forces opposed to any form of substantive democratic politics and pedagogy? What role can public intellectuals, whether professors or students, perform in opening up the democratic potential of the university through “raising important questions about the mutually informing relationship among higher education, critical pedagogical practices, and the promise of a substantive democracy”?
While “contestation and struggle” still exist (often in isolation) in the academy, the university’s role as a “counterinstitution,” willing to question assumptions, interrogate prevailing notions, critique conventional wisdom, and, importantly, challenge and expose power, has been considerably undermined by militarization, corporatism, and right-wing “patriotically correct” fundamentalism. As such, teachers, students and citizens must take on the individual and social responsibility founded in the links between both critical thought and critical intervention, and rigorous intellectual work and deliberate political engagement, to invigorate the academy and “reclaim higher education as a democratic public sphere and counterinstitution” in which civic responsibility, a culture of critique, and a commitment to social engagement are rooted in a critical democratic politics and pedagogy. A question attends these insights: in whose interest, in what direction, with what goals, and with what likely consequences should pedagogical work be carried out, inside and outside higher education?
Giroux argues that higher education must move beyond the academy in ways that connect projects in higher education to the “enabling and development of social movements, public spheres, and groups of critical citizens” who recognize that in a globally interconnected and interdependent world we can no longer refuse to confront injustice, aggression, dogma and exploitation because no one is immune from the harmful, and potentially catastrophic political, personal and social consequences of militarization, corporatism and right-wing fundamentalism.
As part of a pressing process of “demilitarizing knowledge, social relations, and values,” intellectuals, students, cultural workers and citizens must move beyond the simple “consumption of knowledge” and embark on projects in oppositional and resistance pedagogy dedicated to knowledge “production for peaceful and socially just ends.” In brief, Giroux suggests, any form of peace-producing and substantive democratic education, inside and outside the academy, must work to link knowledge to commitment, learning to social change, understanding to political engagement, consciousness to empowerment and collective resistance, and the classroom to those larger social forces and public discourses that bear down on our lives in multiple contexts.
Such resistance, we can add, must be accomplished while working through the tensions between patience and urgency. We must have the patience to think rationally, reflect critically, deliberate meaningfully and free ourselves from illusions during a period in which, as Gabriel Kolko points out, “our choices are increasingly linked to their implications for human survival.” Consequently, critically reflective patience, though important, cannot be pursued at the expense of social engagement rooted in meaningful participation and effective shaping of decisions directed toward the mobilization of collective resistance to those forces intent on increasing social calamities and human suffering. In other words, we must work to ensure that we do not lose the future in the present, or the present in the future. Our safest path under these conditions is to oppose and resist the “death dealing ideology [and practices] of militarization,” capitalist corporatism, and dogmatism wherever they exist and whenever we confront them by engaging and expanding pedagogical practices that extend “notions of agency, empowerment, and responsibility that operate in the service of life, democratic struggles, and the expansion of human rights.”
There is no longer a question about whether we should resist and oppose military aggression, ideological narrowness, and corporate profit-seeking inside or outside the universities but how best to express our resistance and opposition over the short and long-term, inside and outside the academy. Corporatism, militarism, and fundamentalism operate in manifold ways to shut-down hopes and possibilities, not least of which is their capacity to debilitate dreams. The subversion of our capacity to imagine sabotages our reality to live. A reality without dreams is barbarism, a barbarism witnessed each day in the stark and dreadful consequences of US imperial pursuits.
Here is where Giroux’s notion of “a pedagogy of hope,” as it links to critical thought and imagination and critical intervention and citizenship, is vital and informative. The growing culture of fear and paranoia, the constantly invoked threats of terror, the intensifying cinema of hyper-violence and mutilation, the creeping right-wing dogmatism, the silencing, marginalizing and firing of dissidents in the academy, coupled with an absence of meaningful democratic public options produce forms of demoralization, cynicism and despair that undermine hopes and possibilities for engaged citizenship, social commitments and fighting back. Addressing this “crisis of agency” is at the heart of creating conditions for believing that a substantive democratic politics and pedagogy toward critical citizenship is possible and recognizing they are necessary. Giroux notes, “ . . . hope is a precondition not only for merging matters of agency and social responsibility, but also for imagining a future that does not repeat the present.” He notes elsewhere, in an interview with the Media Education Foundation (www.mef.tv), “If we continue to reproduce the present we may be reproducing a present that eliminates the future.” In addition, we might add, if we permit the present to crush our dreams, we lose the future. Hence, there is his call for an ethical and political vision, commitment and practice that works to not only rigorously negotiate and understand the complexities of history, and resolutely engage and change, so as not to suffer, the present, but importantly “to take students beyond the world they already know,” to one in which we not only “believe that democracy is desirable and possible,” but necessary. At its best, Giroux reminds us, “Pedagogy does not avoid commitment, it makes [commitment] possible!”
In the end, one is deeply inspired by Giroux’s impassioned concern for human rights, meaningful democracy and the future, and empowered by his critical insights into how we can break the chains and transform the university into a substantive democratic public space committed to providing students and global citizens with tools and skills to address our most urgent crises, to critically understand how economic, ideological and military power works and circulates through multiple sites of cultural production, distribution and consumption, and, to intervene as empowered and self-critical agents in the world in ways that expand and ensure the pursuit of greater and better conditions of social justice and democracy.
The University in Chains should be essential reading for everyone inside and outside the academy concerned with the increasing and foreboding militarization of the world, the corporate takeover of every corner of human life, and the narrowing ideological impositions of right-wing “super-patriot” fundamentalists. The book moves crucially from critique to a call for intervention and is therefore indispensable for those attentive to the need for fighting back, as well as those interested in matters of public pedagogy, public education, social justice, human rights, and producing a meaningful democratic vision, culture and practice.
At a time in human history when the perils resulting from silence and passivity in the face of destructive power and institutional malevolence soon promise to outweigh the perils of confronting that power and evil, Giroux’s call for a pedagogy of critical conviction, political engagement and social intervention is imperative in the continuing struggle to overcome practical political powerlessness, reclaim public space as a democratic sphere, and break the chains of injustice and oppression.
The perpetuation of a highly destructive and potentially terminal US militarism across so many spheres of our existence, in culture, politics, ideology, economics and academia, part of the large-scale “process by which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence,” (Geyer), all captured so forcefully in Giroux’s The University in Chains, calls to mind a “clash of imperatives” noted in the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto: “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”13
* Related Article: The University in Chains: An Interview with Henry A. Giroux, by Scott Jaschik
See “Top United States DVD Rentals for the week ending 5 August 2007,” online at: www.imdb.com/boxoffice/rentals. ↑
See “Movie Box Office: August 3-5, 2007.” ↑
“The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” Congressional Research Reports for the People, June 28, 2007. ↑
Andrew Taylor, “House approves $460B Pentagon budget,” Associated Press, August 5, 2007. Also see, Frida Berrigan, “Peace is not Presidential: The Candidates on the Pentagon,” Foreign Policy in Focus, August 11, 2007. The “real Pentagon budget” is closer to $1 trillion dollars per year when one includes all Military Related Expenditures such as nuclear weapons, State Department international affairs, science and space research and development, Veterans Administration, interest payments on debt accumulated from past wars, Homeland Security, military retirements expenditures, and intelligence agencies. See James M. Cypher, “From Military Keynesianism to Global-Neoliberal Militarism,” Monthly Review, June 2007. ↑
See “Iraqi Deaths Due to US Invasion,” Just Foreign Policy. ↑
Jane Mayer, “The Black Sites,” The New Yorker, August 13, 2007. ↑
See “Pilotless Robot Bomber Squadron Heads for Afghanistan, Iraq,” Associated Press, July 16, 2007. ↑
Max Blumenthal, “‘Kill or Convert,’ Brought to You by the Pentagon,” The Nation, August 8, 2007. Also see, “Military Crusade in Iraq.” ↑
William Hartung, “Myths of Mideast Arms Sales,” CommonDreams.org, August 7, 2007. ↑
Henry Giroux, The University in Chains (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007), p. 18. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are contained in The University in Chains. ↑
Ibid. p.19. ↑
Ibid, p.24. ↑
“The Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” July 9, 1955. ↑
Scott Morris, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education and Technology at Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, NM, and an outreach coordinator for the Radical Philosophers Association. He can be reached at: dmorrisscott@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Scott.
“Of all the enemies of public liberty war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
– James Madison, “Political Observations,” 1795
“God is pro-war”
–Jerry Falwell, 2004
The ways in which a stark and dreadful militarization permeates and impacts US and global culture is evidenced by even a cursory examination of recent news reports and events. For example, the film “300,” a xenophobic celebration of hyper-masculine militarized mass killing and brutality, was the number one DVD rental last week1; “The Bourne Ultimatum,” a film rooted in CIA torture, deceit, assassination and espionage, was last week’s top grossing box-office film2; Congressional Research Reports for the People estimates Congress has approved roughly $610 billion for the military operations instituted since 9/113; the House approved a $459.6 billion Pentagon budget for 2008 (not including supplemental spending on Iraq and Afghanistan or nuclear weapons programs through the DOE that would push the figure well-beyond $600 billion)4; Just Foreign Policy reported one million Iraqis killed (as of August 11, 2007) as a consequence of the US aggression initiated in March 20035; The New Yorker’s most read online article last week was “The Black Sites: a rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program6; the Air Force announced that “hunter-killer” unmanned drones “loaded” with “a ton and a half of guided missiles and bombs, known as ‘The Reaper,’” will soon be headed to the grim killing fields in Iraq and Afghanistan7; “Operation Straight Up,” a right-wing apocalyptic Christian evangelical troupe, will embark on a Defense Department endorsed “Military Crusade in Iraq,” to push “End Times theology” on US troops and deliver “an encouraging word from God to press on to victory8; the Bush Administration proposed to send $63 billion in military aid and weapons to the most volatile region in the world, the Middle East9; the Senate passed an enhanced surveillance bill that includes few safeguards to protect US citizens from spying while oversight is placed into the hands of Bush Administration henchmen Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, and sycophant Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, etc., etc., etc.
This creeping militarization across economics, religion, politics and culture functions as a form of public pedagogy that conditions and directs our values, attitudes, beliefs, desires, allegiances, identities and identifications and is thus a matter of serious interest for those concerned about public education, the direction of knowledge, and meaningful democratic politics in their wider applications. The penetration of matters military into all corners of our social and cultural lives C. Wright Mills referred to as “military metaphysics — the cast of mind that defines . . . reality as basically military.”
When our reality and “cast of mind” is essentially defined militarily, how, we might ask, are we impacted as political, social, intellectual and cultural beings? How can we engage this “military metaphysics” in ways that aid us in developing tools for thinking critically about the causes, agents and effects of militarism, and the concomitant forces of capitalist corporatism, and, more importantly, how can we use that critical understanding toward collective work that will transform the institutions responsible for the militarization and corporatization of US politics and culture? That militarization and corporatism will impact our political and personal lives in multiple ways, perhaps critical, is a stark and inescapable reality that must be confronted, sooner rather than later, with all of our intellectual, moral and political energy. These issues and questions, and much more, are at the core of Henry Giroux’s latest book The University in Chains, a rigorous interrogation and relentless critique of the corporate, military and right-wing forces assaulting the academy (and beyond) in the United States, as well as an insightful and imaginative explication of how we might take-on the challenge of developing a meaningful democratic political culture and substantive democratic public spheres as part of a larger collective project dedicated to transforming the conditions and institutions that currently dominate so much, and threaten so many, of our lives.
Many readers will find it surprising that what they consider a bastion of free inquiry, objective thought and unbiased research, i.e. the university system, is a key institution in US culture in which this “military metaphysics” is increasingly present and influential; it is becoming, in John Armitage’s apt phrase, a “hypermodern militarized knowledge factory.”10 The militarizing factory system of university education not only includes “150 military education institutions in the United States” but also hundreds of university sites in which richly Pentagon-funded and directed research and development is pursued, military personnel (and others) develop the values and tools of the “warfare state,” and students undertake programs of study in preparation for service to “departments and agencies” of the warrior state.
The Association of American Universities has argued, “The nation must cultivate young talent and orient national economic, political, and education systems” to achieve the mutually linked goals of expanding global markets for US corporations and for victory in the war on terrorism.11 That this pursuit of military superiority and corporate domination through the university system of research and development goes largely unchallenged by academics, as well as society in general, should be a source of profound concern and pointed critique.
The militarization of the university is present in many guises. For example, former CIA director and president of Texas A&M, and current Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, is just one small indicator of how the “US security state” (a nexus of political, military and corporate power and interests) is penetrating the university system. Giroux shares a telling anecdote from Cary Nelson who was asked by the UCSD provost, a former CIA employee, during an evaluation of the English Department, “if it were true the literature department would only hire communist faculty?” The question was not a joke! Nor is it a joke, as noted by the Wall Street Journal, that the CIA has become a “growing force on campus,” or that FBI director Robert Mueller has a desire “to foster exchanges between academia and the FBI,” or, how “the secrecy imposed on scholars working for the CIA” sabotages interrogation of prevailing notions, critiques of conventional wisdom, and challenges to power and authority and thus is “antithetical to the notion of the university as a democratic sphere” dedicated to critical debate, discussion and dialogue.
But why is it a problem if professors and universities are in league with US intelligence agencies and the militarized state? Should not the university be disciplined in a post 9/11 world to produce a public discourse in support of US domination of the globe through military might, the eradication of a socialist leaning New Deal society, and encourage a blurring between church and state,” all in the name of freedom of inquiry and the spread of democracy? While some do believe the university should “be disciplined” in these directions (witness ACTA — the right-wing “American Council of Trustees” — and their denunciation of the academy as a “weak link” in the war on terror, the recent firing of Ward Churchill, or, the Senate Committee bill passed in Arizona that calls for a $500 fine if professors are caught “advocating one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy,” etc.), Giroux describes how this marriage between the academy and the militarized state surrenders “the idea of the university as a site of critical dialogue and debate, public service and socially responsible research” to the pursuit of military aggression, profit enhancement, right-wing ideologies and global political and economic power.
In short, the university as an institution potentially dedicated to a substantive democratic culture, critical inquiry and the public good is transmogrified into a repressive sycophant “complicit with a larger set of institutional…commitments to war, violence, fear, surveillance, and the erosion of civic society . . .” Given this “clash of imperatives,” we should consider “what the role of higher education might be [or should be]” when “the government has a free hand to do whatever it wants in the name of national security,” (Dave Price)12 and reflect on how we might guard intellectual and moral integrity.
President Eisenhower’s oft-cited 1961 warning that “we must guard against . . . the military-industrial complex . . . [because] the disastrous rise of misplaced power . . . will . . . endanger our liberties [and] democratic processes,” also included a call to protect the universities from the stark evils of militarization. Eisenhower feared that war and violence would become the organizing principle of society and thus threaten not only democracy but the very idea of, and occasion for, politics. If politics, in brief, is defined as the way we organize ourselves in society around matters of human life, but we develop a society rooted in “military metaphysics” that is dominated by and organized around militarization, i.e. a dreadful structural machine that functions largely to produce profits, death and destruction, we undermine our possibilities for enhancing and protecting human life and thus destroy the possibility of real politics.
Before delivery, Eisenhower excised the phrase “military-industrial-academic complex” from his speech, but still warned that “the free university . . . free ideas and scientific discovery” as well as “intellectual curiosity” were threatened by “the power of money” working in the interest of the militarization of US society and profits for the arms industry. Senator William Fulbright retrieved the excised phrase later in the 1960s, at the height of the US attack on Vietnam, and noted how “the university fails its higher purpose” if it surrenders to the federal government’s pursuit of militarization and the corporate pursuit of profits. “The fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the military-industrial-complex,” about which Eisenhower and Fulbright warned has, unfortunately, continued to penetrate all corners of US culture, including the academy. Higher education has become an institution “that actively embrace[s] multiple constituencies and forms of patronage provided by the federal government, military, and corporate interests,” three essentially authoritarian structures subversive of democracy.
While it seems clear that values promoting substantive democratic practices and structures along with a democratic public spirit should be at the core of university and public education, “few in power,” in Andrew Bacevich’s words, “have openly considered whether…cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles.” One suspects those in power have other interests to occupy their time. Those other interests include producing an authoritarian politics, privatizing the economy, and employing and expanding an aggressive military machine that develop ever greater control and influence over who lives and who dies, and who wins and who loses, along with increased powers to exclude or include, to eviscerate civil rights, and to subvert democratic social values. Giroux argues persuasively that totalitarian power is becoming the norm in the US “as life is more ruthlessly regulated and increasingly placed in the hands of military and state power.”
One consequence of this accelerated militarization is a dual politics of disposability “shaped by the forces of empire,” witnessed on the one hand in “legalized” abuse, torture, rendition and murder, and on the other hand in the impunity from punishment enjoyed by those responsible for these brutal policies. In short, power brings impunity, and impunity protects power.
Under conditions in which militarism and war serve as structuring forces in the society, violence, militarization and aggression, at least for the rulers, functions as “a source of pride rather than alarm.” We should consider the impact on the rest of us when, in Michael Geyer’s words, “civil society organizes itself for the production of violence.” Across US culture, in multiple representational forms ranging from video games, to Internet sites, to films, to television programs, to advertisements, Giroux notes, “hyper-violence provides the organizing optic…while legitimating the fascistic assumption that violence is the only reasonable solution to all . . . problems.” A culture so rich in death tends to treat life very cheaply, as perversely seen in the horrible treatment of injured US soldiers returning from Iraq who are kept in rooms that include “mold, rot, mice and cockroaches” and grimly in what Bob Herbert calls “the apocalypse in Baghdad.”
A number of questions arise: How do we work through the tension between public opinions and attitudes that are generally opposed to military aggression, torture and mass violence, and the increasing militarization of “values, practices, ideologies, social relations and cultural representations” that works to not only merge politics and violence, but recode our memories and direct our experiences? How do we reverse the transition from the “welfare state,” that at least recognizes some notion of a social contract in which we are responsible for one another, to the “warfare state,” that thwarts dissent, debilitates public debate, enforces moral absolutes, celebrates aggression, and thus undermines participatory democracy? How do we overcome the capacity of the militarized state to both create “a disconnected hardening of individuals to suffering,” and to erase from view the massive trauma, brutality and barbaric destruction imposed by the US machine of death abroad? What is the proper response among academics when dissent is seen as unpatriotic and critical citizenship is considered treasonous under conditions in which militarism conditions and directs not only our perceptions of reality but the ways in which we relate with that reality?
These and other questions, offered or intimated by Giroux, must be critically engaged during a historical period in which the United States spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined, is the world’s greatest purveyor of deadly arms, is dedicated to illegal military aggression against anyone, anytime and anywhere, and is “enthralled with [a] military power [that] has become central to our national identity,” while our massive arsenal of highly destructive weapons signifies “who we are and what we stand for.” (Bacevich)
Nick Turse reports that roughly “350 colleges and universities conduct Pentagon funded research.” The Pentagon’s economic and ideological power “can often dictate the sorts of research that get undertaken and the sorts that don’t.” Giroux refers to the enormous power and burgeoning budget of the Pentagon’s military apparatus as possessing a “powerful arm-twisting ability capable of bending higher education to its will,” that is an “ominous and largely ignored disaster in the making . . . ” In short, because of Pentagon power within the academy there is a dedication toward “delivering science and technology solutions to the warfighter.” For example, in 2003 Penn State received $149 million from “the military war machine,” for research and development, while the University of Texas received $87 million, and Carnegie Mellon $60 million often to support research in space-based weapons systems, including “microwave guns, space-based lasers, electromagnetic guns, and holographic decoys,” and Future Combat Systems such as “electric tanks, electro-thermal chemical cannons, [and] unmanned platforms.” (Jay Reed)
Giroux suggests that those working in the “hypermodern militarized knowledge factories” should ask a number of critical and ‘uncomfortable” questions: “What role do intellectuals play in the conditions that allow theory and knowledge to be appropriated [ . . . in ways that] produce lethal weapons, fuel an arms race . . . and corrupt ethical standards…and what can they do politically to prevent [ . . . their work] from being militarized . . .?” And crucially, how do opposition and resistance to militarization in the academy “connect to [public intellectual] work and extend [students’ and teachers’] sense of social and political responsibility to the world outside of the academy?” One vital task for intellectuals is to employ critical pedagogical practices that promote ethical citizenship, encourage a willingness to take risks and responsibilities for a more substantive democracy, and “connect knowledge and power in the interests of social responsibility and justice.”
The University in Chains, is an intellectually rigorous and politically challenging contribution to our understanding of US culture, US politics and US education in our increasingly (and dangerously) militarized society and world, and a careful examination of the ways in which the capitalist market, the Pentagon-system, and right-wing fundamentalism corrupt and condition the academy and culture. The University in Chains is a stunning tour-de-force that meticulously examines how the multi-tiered and interpenetrating military, corporate and right-wing assaults on the university undermine higher education as a potentially and necessary democratic public sphere in which students and teachers could, and should, develop a sense of individual and social agency in the context of experiencing meaningful democratic social relations while identifying, critiquing and working to overcome authoritarian forms of power and authority.
Giroux writes with a clarity and urgency that is riveting and engaging. He operates from a fundamental recognition, “the academy and democracy are in peril,” and from a decisive question, “What is the task of educators at a time when the forces of democracy appear to be in retreat and the emerging ideologies and practices of militarization, corporatism, and political fundamentalism bear down on every aspect of individual and collective experience?” In other words, what are the responsibilities of public intellectuals during a period in which critical thought, rational considerations, radical qualities of character, and a culture of questioning, all necessary to authentic higher education and intellectual creativity, are under assault by corporate, religious, ideological and economic forces opposed to any form of substantive democratic politics and pedagogy? What role can public intellectuals, whether professors or students, perform in opening up the democratic potential of the university through “raising important questions about the mutually informing relationship among higher education, critical pedagogical practices, and the promise of a substantive democracy”?
While “contestation and struggle” still exist (often in isolation) in the academy, the university’s role as a “counterinstitution,” willing to question assumptions, interrogate prevailing notions, critique conventional wisdom, and, importantly, challenge and expose power, has been considerably undermined by militarization, corporatism, and right-wing “patriotically correct” fundamentalism. As such, teachers, students and citizens must take on the individual and social responsibility founded in the links between both critical thought and critical intervention, and rigorous intellectual work and deliberate political engagement, to invigorate the academy and “reclaim higher education as a democratic public sphere and counterinstitution” in which civic responsibility, a culture of critique, and a commitment to social engagement are rooted in a critical democratic politics and pedagogy. A question attends these insights: in whose interest, in what direction, with what goals, and with what likely consequences should pedagogical work be carried out, inside and outside higher education?
Giroux argues that higher education must move beyond the academy in ways that connect projects in higher education to the “enabling and development of social movements, public spheres, and groups of critical citizens” who recognize that in a globally interconnected and interdependent world we can no longer refuse to confront injustice, aggression, dogma and exploitation because no one is immune from the harmful, and potentially catastrophic political, personal and social consequences of militarization, corporatism and right-wing fundamentalism.
As part of a pressing process of “demilitarizing knowledge, social relations, and values,” intellectuals, students, cultural workers and citizens must move beyond the simple “consumption of knowledge” and embark on projects in oppositional and resistance pedagogy dedicated to knowledge “production for peaceful and socially just ends.” In brief, Giroux suggests, any form of peace-producing and substantive democratic education, inside and outside the academy, must work to link knowledge to commitment, learning to social change, understanding to political engagement, consciousness to empowerment and collective resistance, and the classroom to those larger social forces and public discourses that bear down on our lives in multiple contexts.
Such resistance, we can add, must be accomplished while working through the tensions between patience and urgency. We must have the patience to think rationally, reflect critically, deliberate meaningfully and free ourselves from illusions during a period in which, as Gabriel Kolko points out, “our choices are increasingly linked to their implications for human survival.” Consequently, critically reflective patience, though important, cannot be pursued at the expense of social engagement rooted in meaningful participation and effective shaping of decisions directed toward the mobilization of collective resistance to those forces intent on increasing social calamities and human suffering. In other words, we must work to ensure that we do not lose the future in the present, or the present in the future. Our safest path under these conditions is to oppose and resist the “death dealing ideology [and practices] of militarization,” capitalist corporatism, and dogmatism wherever they exist and whenever we confront them by engaging and expanding pedagogical practices that extend “notions of agency, empowerment, and responsibility that operate in the service of life, democratic struggles, and the expansion of human rights.”
There is no longer a question about whether we should resist and oppose military aggression, ideological narrowness, and corporate profit-seeking inside or outside the universities but how best to express our resistance and opposition over the short and long-term, inside and outside the academy. Corporatism, militarism, and fundamentalism operate in manifold ways to shut-down hopes and possibilities, not least of which is their capacity to debilitate dreams. The subversion of our capacity to imagine sabotages our reality to live. A reality without dreams is barbarism, a barbarism witnessed each day in the stark and dreadful consequences of US imperial pursuits.
Here is where Giroux’s notion of “a pedagogy of hope,” as it links to critical thought and imagination and critical intervention and citizenship, is vital and informative. The growing culture of fear and paranoia, the constantly invoked threats of terror, the intensifying cinema of hyper-violence and mutilation, the creeping right-wing dogmatism, the silencing, marginalizing and firing of dissidents in the academy, coupled with an absence of meaningful democratic public options produce forms of demoralization, cynicism and despair that undermine hopes and possibilities for engaged citizenship, social commitments and fighting back. Addressing this “crisis of agency” is at the heart of creating conditions for believing that a substantive democratic politics and pedagogy toward critical citizenship is possible and recognizing they are necessary. Giroux notes, “ . . . hope is a precondition not only for merging matters of agency and social responsibility, but also for imagining a future that does not repeat the present.” He notes elsewhere, in an interview with the Media Education Foundation (www.mef.tv), “If we continue to reproduce the present we may be reproducing a present that eliminates the future.” In addition, we might add, if we permit the present to crush our dreams, we lose the future. Hence, there is his call for an ethical and political vision, commitment and practice that works to not only rigorously negotiate and understand the complexities of history, and resolutely engage and change, so as not to suffer, the present, but importantly “to take students beyond the world they already know,” to one in which we not only “believe that democracy is desirable and possible,” but necessary. At its best, Giroux reminds us, “Pedagogy does not avoid commitment, it makes [commitment] possible!”
In the end, one is deeply inspired by Giroux’s impassioned concern for human rights, meaningful democracy and the future, and empowered by his critical insights into how we can break the chains and transform the university into a substantive democratic public space committed to providing students and global citizens with tools and skills to address our most urgent crises, to critically understand how economic, ideological and military power works and circulates through multiple sites of cultural production, distribution and consumption, and, to intervene as empowered and self-critical agents in the world in ways that expand and ensure the pursuit of greater and better conditions of social justice and democracy.
The University in Chains should be essential reading for everyone inside and outside the academy concerned with the increasing and foreboding militarization of the world, the corporate takeover of every corner of human life, and the narrowing ideological impositions of right-wing “super-patriot” fundamentalists. The book moves crucially from critique to a call for intervention and is therefore indispensable for those attentive to the need for fighting back, as well as those interested in matters of public pedagogy, public education, social justice, human rights, and producing a meaningful democratic vision, culture and practice.
At a time in human history when the perils resulting from silence and passivity in the face of destructive power and institutional malevolence soon promise to outweigh the perils of confronting that power and evil, Giroux’s call for a pedagogy of critical conviction, political engagement and social intervention is imperative in the continuing struggle to overcome practical political powerlessness, reclaim public space as a democratic sphere, and break the chains of injustice and oppression.
The perpetuation of a highly destructive and potentially terminal US militarism across so many spheres of our existence, in culture, politics, ideology, economics and academia, part of the large-scale “process by which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence,” (Geyer), all captured so forcefully in Giroux’s The University in Chains, calls to mind a “clash of imperatives” noted in the 1955 Russell-Einstein Manifesto: “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”13
* Related Article: The University in Chains: An Interview with Henry A. Giroux, by Scott Jaschik
See “Top United States DVD Rentals for the week ending 5 August 2007,” online at: www.imdb.com/boxoffice/rentals. ↑
See “Movie Box Office: August 3-5, 2007.” ↑
“The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” Congressional Research Reports for the People, June 28, 2007. ↑
Andrew Taylor, “House approves $460B Pentagon budget,” Associated Press, August 5, 2007. Also see, Frida Berrigan, “Peace is not Presidential: The Candidates on the Pentagon,” Foreign Policy in Focus, August 11, 2007. The “real Pentagon budget” is closer to $1 trillion dollars per year when one includes all Military Related Expenditures such as nuclear weapons, State Department international affairs, science and space research and development, Veterans Administration, interest payments on debt accumulated from past wars, Homeland Security, military retirements expenditures, and intelligence agencies. See James M. Cypher, “From Military Keynesianism to Global-Neoliberal Militarism,” Monthly Review, June 2007. ↑
See “Iraqi Deaths Due to US Invasion,” Just Foreign Policy. ↑
Jane Mayer, “The Black Sites,” The New Yorker, August 13, 2007. ↑
See “Pilotless Robot Bomber Squadron Heads for Afghanistan, Iraq,” Associated Press, July 16, 2007. ↑
Max Blumenthal, “‘Kill or Convert,’ Brought to You by the Pentagon,” The Nation, August 8, 2007. Also see, “Military Crusade in Iraq.” ↑
William Hartung, “Myths of Mideast Arms Sales,” CommonDreams.org, August 7, 2007. ↑
Henry Giroux, The University in Chains (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007), p. 18. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are contained in The University in Chains. ↑
Ibid. p.19. ↑
Ibid, p.24. ↑
“The Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” July 9, 1955. ↑
Scott Morris, Ph.D, is an Assistant Professor in the College of Education and Technology at Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, NM, and an outreach coordinator for the Radical Philosophers Association. He can be reached at: dmorrisscott@yahoo.com. Read other articles by Scott.
Responsibility and War Guilt - A Culture-Setting Intelligentsia - Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky interviewed by
Gabriel Matthew Schivone
August 16, 2007
[Conference Interview with Noam Chomsky, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mon. June 25, 2007]
The Responsibility of Intellectuals
GMS: Addressing a community of mostly students during a public forum at the steps of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1969, you expressed: “This particular community is a very relevant one to consider at a place like MIT because, of course, you’re all free to enter this community—in fact, you’re invited and encouraged to enter it. The community of technical intelligentsia, and weapons designers, and counterinsurgency experts, and pragmatic planners of an American empire is one that you have a great deal of inducement to become associated with. The inducements, in fact, are very real; their rewards in power, and affluence, and prestige and authority are quite significant.” Let’s start off talking about the significance of these inducements, on both a university and societal level. How crucial is it, in your view, that students particularly consider and understand this, as you describe, highly technocratic social order of the academic community and its function in society, that is, comparably to the more directly associated professional scholarship considering it?
CHOMSKY: How important it is, to an individual, depends on what that individual’s goals in life are. If the goals are to enrich yourself, gain privilege, do technically interesting work—in brief, if the goals are self-satisfaction—then these questions are of no particular relevance. If you care about the consequences of your actions, what’s happening in the world, what the future will be like for your grandchildren and so on, then they’re very crucial. So, it’s a question of what choices people make.
What makes students a natural audience to speak to? And do you think it’s worth ‘speaking truth’ to the professional scholarship as well or differently? Are there any short- or long-term possibilities here?
I’m always uneasy about the concept of “speaking truth,” as if we somehow know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.
As for possibilities, they are limited only by will and choice.
Students are at a stage of their lives where these choices are most urgent and compelling, and when they also enjoy unusual, if not unique, freedom and opportunity to explore the choices available, to evaluate them, and to pursue them.
In your view, what is it about the privileges within university education and academic scholarship which, as you assert in some of the things you’ve written, correlate with them a greater responsibility for catastrophic atrocities such as the Vietnam War or those in the Middle East in which the United States is now involved?
Well, there are really some moral truisms. One of them is that opportunity confers responsibility. If you have very limited opportunities, then you have limited responsibility for what you do. If you have substantial opportunity you have greater responsibility for what you do. I mean, that’s kind of elementary, I don’t know how it can be discussed.
And the people who we call ‘intellectuals’ are just those who happen to have substantial opportunity. They have privilege, they have resources, they have training. In our society, they have a high degree of freedom—not a hundred percent, but quite a lot—and that gives them a range of choices that they can pursue with a fair degree of freedom, and that hence simply confers responsibility for the predictable consequences of the choices they make.
The Rise of a Technical Intelligentsia
I think at this point it may do well for us to go over a bit the beginnings and evolution of the ideological currents which now prevail throughout modern social intellectual life in the U.S. Essentially, from where may we trace the development of this strong coterie of technical experts in the schools, and elsewhere, sometimes having been referred to as a ‘bought’ or ‘secular priesthood’?
Well, it really goes back to the latter-part of the nineteenth century, when there was substantial discussion—not just in the United States but in Europe, too—of what was then sometimes called ‘a new class’ of scientific intellectuals. In that period of time there was a level of knowledge and technical expertise accumulating that allowed a kind of managerial class of educated, trained people to have a greater share in decision-making and planning. It was thought that they were a new class displacing the aristocracy, the owners, political leaders and so on, and they could have a larger role—and of course they liked that idea.
Out of this group developed an ideology of technocratic planning. In industry it was called ‘scientific management’. It developed in intellectual life with a concept of what was called a ‘responsible class’ of technocratic, serious intellectuals who could solve the world’s problems rationally, and would have to be protected from the ‘vulgar masses’ who might interfere with them. And it goes right up until the present.
Just how realistic this is, is another question, but for the class of technical intellectuals, it’s a very attractive conception that, ‘We are the rational, intelligent people, and management and decision-making should be in our hands.’
Actually, as I’ve pointed out in some of the things I’ve written, it’s very close to Bolshevism. And, in fact, if you put side-by-side, say, statements by people like Robert McNamara and V.I. Lenin, it’s strikingly similar. In both cases there’s a conception of a vanguard of rational planners who know the direction that society ought to go and can make efficient decisions, and have to be allowed to do so without interference from, what one of them, Walter Lippmann, called the ‘meddlesome and ignorant outsiders’ , namely, the population, who just get in the way.
It’s not an entirely new conception: it’s just a new category of people. Two hundred years ago you didn’t have an easily identifiable class of technical intellectuals, just generally educated people. But as scientific and technical progress increased there were people who felt they can appropriate it and become the proper managers of the society, in every domain. That, as I said, goes from scientific management in industry, to social and political control.
There are periods in history, for example, during the Kennedy years, when these ideas really flourished. There were, as they called themselves, ‘the best and the brightest.’ The ‘smart guys’ who could run everything if only they were allowed to; who could do things scientifically without people getting in their way.
It’s a pretty constant strain, and understandable. And it underlies the fear and dislike of democracy that runs through elite culture always, and very dramatically right now. It often correlates closely with posturing about love of democracy. As any reader of Orwell would expect, these two things tend to correlate. The more you hate democracy, the more you talk about how wonderful it is and how much you’re dedicated to it. It’s one of the clearer expressions of the visceral fear and dislike of democracy, and of allowing, again, going back to Lippmann, the ‘ignorant and meddlesome outsiders’ to get in our way. They have to be distracted and marginalized somehow while we can take care of the serious questions.
Now, that’s the basic strain. And you find it all the time, but increasingly in the modern period when, at least, claims to expertise become somewhat more plausible. Whether they’re authentic or not is, again, a different question. But, the claims to expertise are very striking. So, economists tell you, ‘We know how to run the economy’; the political scientists tell you, ‘We know how to run the world, and you keep out of it because you don’t have special knowledge and training.’
When you look at it, the claims tend to erode pretty quickly. It’s not quantum physics; there is, at least, a pretense, and sometimes, some justification for the claims. But what matters for human life is, typically, well within the reach of the concerned person who is willing to undertake some effort.
Given the, albeit, self-proclaimed notion that this new class is entitled to decision-making, how close are they to actual policy, then?
My feeling is that they’re nowhere near as powerful as they think they are. So, when, say, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the technocratic elite which is taking over the running of society—or when McNamara wrote about it, or others—there’s a lot of illusion there. Meaning, they can gain positions of authority and decision-making when they act in the interests of those who really own and run the society. You can have people that are just as competent, or more competent, and who have conceptions of social and economic order that run counter to, say, corporate power, and they’re not going to be in the planning sectors. So, to get into those planning sectors you first of all have to conform to the interests of the real concentrations of power.
And, again, there are a lot of illusions about this—in the media, too. Tom Wicker is a famous example, one of the ‘left commentators’ of the New York Times. He would get very angry when critics would tell him he’s conforming to power interests and that he’s keeping within the doctrinal framework of the media, which goes back to their corporate structure and so on. And he would answer, very angrily—and correctly—that nobody tells him what to say. He writes anything he wants,—which is absolutely true. But if he wasn’t writing the things he did he wouldn’t have a column in the New York Times.
That’s the kind of thing that is very hard to perceive. People do not want—or often are not able—to perceive that they are conforming to external authority. They feel themselves to be very free—and indeed they are—as long as they conform. But power lies elsewhere. That’s as old as history in the modern period. It’s often very explicit.
Adam Smith, for example, discussing England, quite interestingly pointed out that the merchants and manufacturers—the economic forces of his day—are the ‘principal architects of policy’, and they make sure that their own interests are ‘most peculiarly attended to’, no matter how grievous the effect on others, including the people in England. And that’s a good principle of statecraft, and social and economic planning, which runs pretty much to the present. When you get people with management and decision-making skills, they can enter into that system and they can make the actual decisions—within a framework that’s set within the real concentrations of power. And now it’s not the merchants and manufacturers of Adam Smith’s day, it’s the multinational corporations, financial institutions, and so on. But, stray too far beyond their concerns and you won’t be the decision-maker.
It’s not a mechanical phenomenon, but it’s overwhelmingly true that the people who make it to decision-making positions (that is, what they think of as decision-making positions) are those who conform to the basic framework of the people who fundamentally own and run the society. That’s why you have a certain choice of technocratic managers and not some other choice of people equally or better capable of carrying out policies but have different ideas.
What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an individual level? What can we learn about how one views oneself often in positions of power or authority?
You almost never find anyone, whether it’s in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, ‘I’m really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.’ Almost invariably you get noble rhetoric like: ‘We’re working for the benefit of the people.’ The corporate executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and community; the friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start their business; the political leader who’s trying to bring freedom and justice to the world—and they probably all believe it. I’m not suggesting that they’re lying. There’s an array of routine justifications for whatever you’re doing. And it’s easy to believe them. It’s very hard to look into the mirror and say, ‘Yeah, that guy looking at me is a vicious criminal.’ It’s much easier to say, ‘That guy looking at me is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things because it’s for the benefit of everyone.’
Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called ‘the theologian of the establishment’. And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it’s what you do if you’re an intellectual). But what it came down to is that, ‘Even if you try to do good, evil’s going to come out of it; that’s the paradox of grace’. —And that’s wonderful for war criminals. ‘We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.’ And it’s influential. So, I don’t think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. —Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they’re doing, they’ll say: ‘We’re trying to preserve the peace of the world.’ People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice’, and so on.
But, we don’t take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They’ll give you the same answers. But, we don’t take that seriously because they can know what they’re doing if they choose to. If they choose not to, that’s their choice. If they choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that’s their choice. But it doesn’t change the moral responsibility. We understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It’s very hard to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.
In fact, one of the—maybe the most—elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something’s right for me, it’s right for you; if it’s wrong for you, it’s wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he’d be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It’s not even discussable. Because we don’t apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.
There’s a lot of talk about ‘terror’ and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it’s considered highly moral; it’s considered self-defense, and so on. Now, their terror against us, that’s awful, and terrible, and so on.
But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because that means accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that’s accepted, either in personal or political life. Very rarely.
Looking at Nuremberg and the Culture of Torture
What about criminal responsibility and intellectuals? Nuremberg is an interesting precedent.
The Nuremberg case is a very interesting precedent. First of all, the Nuremberg trials—of all the tribunals that have taken place, from then until today—it is, I think, the most serious by far. But, nevertheless, it was very seriously flawed. And it was recognized to be. When Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor, wrote about it, he recognized that it was flawed, and it was so for a number of fundamental reasons. For one thing, the Nazi war criminals were being tried for crimes that had not yet been declared to be crimes. So, it was ex post facto. ‘We’re now declaring these things you did to be crimes.’ That is already questionable.
Secondly, the choice of what was considered a crime was based on a very explicit criterion, namely, denial of the principle of universality. In other words, something was called a crime at Nuremberg if they did it and we didn’t do it.
So, for example, the bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a crime. The bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and so on—those aren’t crimes. Why? Because we did them. So, therefore, it’s not a crime. In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did. Admiral Doenitz, a submarine commander who was involved in all kinds of war crimes, called in the defense a high official in the British admiralty and, I think, Admiral Nimitz from the United States, who testified that, ‘Yeah, that’s the kind of thing we did.’ And, therefore, they weren’t sentenced for these crimes. Doenitz was absolved. And that’s the way it ran through. Now, that’s a very serious flaw. Nevertheless, of all the tribunals, that’s the most serious one.
When Chief Justice Jackson, chief counsel for the prosecution, spoke to the tribunal and explained to them the importance of what they were doing, he said, to paraphrase, that: ‘We are handing these defendants a poisoned chalice, and if we ever sip from it we must be subject to the same punishments, otherwise this whole trial is a farce.’ Well, you can look at the history from then on, and we’ve sipped from the poisoned chalice many times, but it’s never been considered a crime. So, that means we are saying that trial was a farce.
Interestingly, in Jackson’s opening statement he claimed that the defense did not wish to incriminate the whole German populace from whence the defendants came, for the crimes they committed, but only the “planners and designers” of those crimes, “the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness…of this terrible war.”
That’s correct. And that’s another principle which we flatly reject. So, at Nuremberg, we weren’t trying the people who threw Jews into crematoria; we were trying the leaders. When we ever have a trial for crimes it’s of some low-level person—like a torturer from Abu Ghraib—not the people who were setting up the framework from which they operate. And we certainly don’t try political leaders for the crime of aggression. That’s out of the question. The invasion of Iraq was about as clear-cut a case of aggression than you can imagine. In fact, by the Nuremberg principles, if you read them carefully, the U.S. war against Nicaragua was a crime of aggression for which Ronald Reagan should have been tried. But, it’s inconceivable; you can’t even mention it in the West. And the reason is our radical denial of the most elementary moral truisms. We just flatly reject them. We don’t even think we reject them, and that’s even worse than rejecting them outright.
I mean, if we were able to say to ourselves, ‘Look, we are totally immoral, we don’t accept elementary moral principles,’ that would be a kind of respectable position in a certain way. But, when we sink to the level where we cannot even perceive that we’re violating elementary moral principles and international law, that’s pretty bad. But that’s the nature of the intellectual culture—not just in the United States—but in powerful societies everywhere.
You mentioned Doenitz escaping culpability for his crimes. Two who didn’t escape punishment and were among the most severely punished at Nuremberg were Julius Streicher, an editor of a major newspaper, and—also an interesting example—Dr. Wolfram Sievers of the Ahnenerbe Society’s Institute of Military Scientific Research, whose own crimes were traced back to the University of Strasbourg. Not the typical people prosecuted for international war crimes, it seems, given their civilian professions.
Yeah; and there’s a justification for that, namely, those defendants could understand what they were doing. They could understand the consequences of the work that they were carrying out. But, of course, if we were to accept this awful principle of universality, that would have a pretty long reach—to journalists, university researchers, and so on.
Let me quote for you the mission statement of the Army Research Office. This “premier extramural” research agency of the Army is grounded upon “developing and exploiting innovative advances to insure the Nation’s technological superiority.” It executes this mission “through conduct of an aggressive basic science research program on behalf of the Army so that cutting-edge scientific discoveries and the general store of scientific knowledge will be optimally used to develop and improve weapons systems that establish land-force dominance.”
This is a pentagon office, and they’re doing their job. In our system, the military is under civilian control. Civilians assign a certain task to the military: their job is to obey, and carry the role out, otherwise you quit. That’s what it means to have a military under civilian control. So, you can’t really blame them for their mission statement. They’re doing what they’re told to do by the civilian authorities. The civilian authorities are the culpable ones. If we don’t like those policies (and I don’t, and you don’t), then we go back to those civilians who designed the framework and gave the orders.
You can, as the Nuremberg precedents indicated, be charged with obeying illegal orders, but that’s often a stretch. If a person is in a position of military command, they are sworn, in fact, to obey civilian orders, even if they don’t like them. If you say they’re really just criminal orders, then, yes, they can reject them, and get into trouble and so on. But this is just carrying out the function that they’re ordered to carry out. So, we go straight back to the civilian authority and then to the general intellectual culture, which regards this as proper and legitimate. And now we’re back to universities, newspapers, the centers of the doctrinal system.
It’s just the forthright honesty of the mission statement which is also very striking, I think.
Well, it’s like going to an armory and finding out they’re making better guns. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Their orders are, ‘Make this gun work better.’, and so they’re doing it. And, if they’re honest, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re doing; that’s what the civilian authorities told us to do.’
At some point, people have to ask, ‘Do I want to make a better gun?’ That’s where the Nuremberg issues arise. But, you really can’t blame people very severely for carrying out the orders that they’re told to carry out when there’s nothing in the culture that tells them there’s anything wrong with it. I mean, you have to be kind of like a moral hero to perceive it, to break out of the cultural framework and say, ‘Look, what I’m doing is wrong.’ Like somebody who deserts from the army because they think the war is wrong. That’s not the place to assign guilt, I think. Just as at Nuremberg. As I said, they didn’t try the SS guards who threw people into crematoria, at Nuremberg. They might have been tried elsewhere, but not at Nuremberg.
But, in this case, the results of the ARO’s mission statement in harvesting scholarly work for better weapons design, it’s professors, scholars, researchers, scientific designers, etc., who have these choices to focus serious intellectual effort and to be so used for such ends, and who aren’t acting necessarily from direct orders but are acting more out of freewill.
It’s freewill, but don’t forget that there’s a general intellectual culture that raises no objection to this.
Let’s take the Iraq war. There’s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking ‘What should we do?’, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that ‘carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows’ (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. —I mean, you can find it. I’ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that’s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that ‘to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows’?
So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who’s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice—they’re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can’t. Because our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.
And take Iran. Both political parties—and practically the whole press—accept it as legitimate and, in fact, honorable, that ‘all options are on the table’, presumably including nuclear weapons, to quote Hilary Clinton and everyone else. ‘All options are on the table’ means we threaten war. Well, there’s something called the U.N. Charter, which outlaws ‘the threat or use of force’ in international affairs. Does anybody care? Actually, I saw one op-ed somewhere by Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist close to the government, who pointed out that threats are serious violations of international law. But that’s so rare that when you find it it’s like finding a diamond in a pile of hay or something. It’s not part of the culture. We’re allowed to threaten anyone we want—and to attack anyone we want. And, when a person grows up and acts in a culture like that, they’re culpable in a sense, but the culpability is much broader.
I was just reading a couple days ago a review of a new book by Steven Miles, a medical doctor and bioethicist, who ran through 35,000 pages of documents he got from the Freedom of Information Act on the torture in Abu Ghraib. And the question that concerned him is, ‘What were the doctors doing during all of this?’ All through those torture sessions there were doctors, nurses, behavioral scientists and others who were organizing them. What were they doing when this torture was going on? Well, you go through the detailed record and it turns out that they were designing and improving it. Just like Nazi doctors.
Robert Jay Lifton did a big study on Nazi doctors. He points out in connection with the Nazi doctors that, in a way, it’s not those individual doctors who had the final guilt, it was a culture and a society which accepted torture and criminal activities as legitimate. The same is true with the tortures at Abu Ghraib. I mean, just to focus on them as if they’re somehow terrible people is just a serious mistake. They’re coming out of a culture that regards this as legitimate. Maybe there are some excesses you don’t really do but torture in interrogation is considered legitimate.
There’s a big debate now on, ‘Who’s an enemy combatant?’; a big technical debate. Suppose we invade another country and we capture somebody who’s defending the country against our invasion: what do you mean to call them an ‘enemy combatant’? If some country invaded the United States and let’s say you were captured throwing a rock at one of the soldiers, would it be legitimate to send you to the equivalent of Guantanamo, and then have a debate about whether you’re a ‘lawful’ or ‘unlawful’ combatant? The whole discussion is kind of, like, off in outer space somewhere. But, in a culture which accepts that we own and rule the world, it’s reasonable. But, also, we should go back to the roots of the intellectual or moral culture, not just to the individuals directly involved.
As you mentioned before, whether students are taught serious moral principles: At my school, the University of Arizona, there are courses in bioethics—required ones, in fact, to hard scientific undergraduates (I took one, out of interest)— which mostly just discuss scenarios in terms of ‘slippery slopes’ and hypothetical questions within certain bounds, and still none at all in the social sciences or humanities. Do you think there should be? Would that be beneficial?
If they were honest, yes. If they’re honest they’d be talking about what we’re talking about, and doing case studies. There’s no point pontificating about high minded principles. That’s easy. Nazi doctors could do that, too.
Let’s take a look at the cases and ask how the principles apply—to Vietnam; to El Salvador; to Iraq; to Palestine—just run through the cases and see how the principles apply to our own actions. That’s what is of prime importance, and what is least discussed.
As a note to end on, there seems to be some very serious aberrations and defects in our society and our level of culture. How, in your view, might they be corrected and a new level of culture be established, say, one in which torture isn’t accepted? (After all, slavery and child labor were each accepted for a long period of time and now are not.)
Your examples give the answer to the question, the only answer that has ever been known. Slavery and child labor didn’t become unacceptable by magic. It took hard, dedicated, courageous work by lots of people. The same is true of torture, which was once completely routine.
If I remember correctly, the renowned Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie wrote somewhere that prisons began to proliferate in Norway in the early 19th century. They weren’t much needed before, when the punishment for robbery could be driving a stake through the hand of the accused. Now it’s perhaps the most civilized country on earth.
There has been a gradual codification of constraints against torture, and they have had some effect, though only limited, even before the Bush regression to savagery. Alfred McCoy’s work reviews that ugly history. Still, there is improvement, and there can be more if enough people are willing to undertake the efforts that led to large-scale rejection of slavery and child labor—still far from complete.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
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Gabriel Matthew Schivone
August 16, 2007
[Conference Interview with Noam Chomsky, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mon. June 25, 2007]
The Responsibility of Intellectuals
GMS: Addressing a community of mostly students during a public forum at the steps of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1969, you expressed: “This particular community is a very relevant one to consider at a place like MIT because, of course, you’re all free to enter this community—in fact, you’re invited and encouraged to enter it. The community of technical intelligentsia, and weapons designers, and counterinsurgency experts, and pragmatic planners of an American empire is one that you have a great deal of inducement to become associated with. The inducements, in fact, are very real; their rewards in power, and affluence, and prestige and authority are quite significant.” Let’s start off talking about the significance of these inducements, on both a university and societal level. How crucial is it, in your view, that students particularly consider and understand this, as you describe, highly technocratic social order of the academic community and its function in society, that is, comparably to the more directly associated professional scholarship considering it?
CHOMSKY: How important it is, to an individual, depends on what that individual’s goals in life are. If the goals are to enrich yourself, gain privilege, do technically interesting work—in brief, if the goals are self-satisfaction—then these questions are of no particular relevance. If you care about the consequences of your actions, what’s happening in the world, what the future will be like for your grandchildren and so on, then they’re very crucial. So, it’s a question of what choices people make.
What makes students a natural audience to speak to? And do you think it’s worth ‘speaking truth’ to the professional scholarship as well or differently? Are there any short- or long-term possibilities here?
I’m always uneasy about the concept of “speaking truth,” as if we somehow know the truth and only have to enlighten others who have not risen to our elevated level. The search for truth is a cooperative, unending endeavor. We can, and should, engage in it to the extent we can and encourage others to do so as well, seeking to free ourselves from constraints imposed by coercive institutions, dogma, irrationality, excessive conformity and lack of initiative and imagination, and numerous other obstacles.
As for possibilities, they are limited only by will and choice.
Students are at a stage of their lives where these choices are most urgent and compelling, and when they also enjoy unusual, if not unique, freedom and opportunity to explore the choices available, to evaluate them, and to pursue them.
In your view, what is it about the privileges within university education and academic scholarship which, as you assert in some of the things you’ve written, correlate with them a greater responsibility for catastrophic atrocities such as the Vietnam War or those in the Middle East in which the United States is now involved?
Well, there are really some moral truisms. One of them is that opportunity confers responsibility. If you have very limited opportunities, then you have limited responsibility for what you do. If you have substantial opportunity you have greater responsibility for what you do. I mean, that’s kind of elementary, I don’t know how it can be discussed.
And the people who we call ‘intellectuals’ are just those who happen to have substantial opportunity. They have privilege, they have resources, they have training. In our society, they have a high degree of freedom—not a hundred percent, but quite a lot—and that gives them a range of choices that they can pursue with a fair degree of freedom, and that hence simply confers responsibility for the predictable consequences of the choices they make.
The Rise of a Technical Intelligentsia
I think at this point it may do well for us to go over a bit the beginnings and evolution of the ideological currents which now prevail throughout modern social intellectual life in the U.S. Essentially, from where may we trace the development of this strong coterie of technical experts in the schools, and elsewhere, sometimes having been referred to as a ‘bought’ or ‘secular priesthood’?
Well, it really goes back to the latter-part of the nineteenth century, when there was substantial discussion—not just in the United States but in Europe, too—of what was then sometimes called ‘a new class’ of scientific intellectuals. In that period of time there was a level of knowledge and technical expertise accumulating that allowed a kind of managerial class of educated, trained people to have a greater share in decision-making and planning. It was thought that they were a new class displacing the aristocracy, the owners, political leaders and so on, and they could have a larger role—and of course they liked that idea.
Out of this group developed an ideology of technocratic planning. In industry it was called ‘scientific management’. It developed in intellectual life with a concept of what was called a ‘responsible class’ of technocratic, serious intellectuals who could solve the world’s problems rationally, and would have to be protected from the ‘vulgar masses’ who might interfere with them. And it goes right up until the present.
Just how realistic this is, is another question, but for the class of technical intellectuals, it’s a very attractive conception that, ‘We are the rational, intelligent people, and management and decision-making should be in our hands.’
Actually, as I’ve pointed out in some of the things I’ve written, it’s very close to Bolshevism. And, in fact, if you put side-by-side, say, statements by people like Robert McNamara and V.I. Lenin, it’s strikingly similar. In both cases there’s a conception of a vanguard of rational planners who know the direction that society ought to go and can make efficient decisions, and have to be allowed to do so without interference from, what one of them, Walter Lippmann, called the ‘meddlesome and ignorant outsiders’ , namely, the population, who just get in the way.
It’s not an entirely new conception: it’s just a new category of people. Two hundred years ago you didn’t have an easily identifiable class of technical intellectuals, just generally educated people. But as scientific and technical progress increased there were people who felt they can appropriate it and become the proper managers of the society, in every domain. That, as I said, goes from scientific management in industry, to social and political control.
There are periods in history, for example, during the Kennedy years, when these ideas really flourished. There were, as they called themselves, ‘the best and the brightest.’ The ‘smart guys’ who could run everything if only they were allowed to; who could do things scientifically without people getting in their way.
It’s a pretty constant strain, and understandable. And it underlies the fear and dislike of democracy that runs through elite culture always, and very dramatically right now. It often correlates closely with posturing about love of democracy. As any reader of Orwell would expect, these two things tend to correlate. The more you hate democracy, the more you talk about how wonderful it is and how much you’re dedicated to it. It’s one of the clearer expressions of the visceral fear and dislike of democracy, and of allowing, again, going back to Lippmann, the ‘ignorant and meddlesome outsiders’ to get in our way. They have to be distracted and marginalized somehow while we can take care of the serious questions.
Now, that’s the basic strain. And you find it all the time, but increasingly in the modern period when, at least, claims to expertise become somewhat more plausible. Whether they’re authentic or not is, again, a different question. But, the claims to expertise are very striking. So, economists tell you, ‘We know how to run the economy’; the political scientists tell you, ‘We know how to run the world, and you keep out of it because you don’t have special knowledge and training.’
When you look at it, the claims tend to erode pretty quickly. It’s not quantum physics; there is, at least, a pretense, and sometimes, some justification for the claims. But what matters for human life is, typically, well within the reach of the concerned person who is willing to undertake some effort.
Given the, albeit, self-proclaimed notion that this new class is entitled to decision-making, how close are they to actual policy, then?
My feeling is that they’re nowhere near as powerful as they think they are. So, when, say, John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the technocratic elite which is taking over the running of society—or when McNamara wrote about it, or others—there’s a lot of illusion there. Meaning, they can gain positions of authority and decision-making when they act in the interests of those who really own and run the society. You can have people that are just as competent, or more competent, and who have conceptions of social and economic order that run counter to, say, corporate power, and they’re not going to be in the planning sectors. So, to get into those planning sectors you first of all have to conform to the interests of the real concentrations of power.
And, again, there are a lot of illusions about this—in the media, too. Tom Wicker is a famous example, one of the ‘left commentators’ of the New York Times. He would get very angry when critics would tell him he’s conforming to power interests and that he’s keeping within the doctrinal framework of the media, which goes back to their corporate structure and so on. And he would answer, very angrily—and correctly—that nobody tells him what to say. He writes anything he wants,—which is absolutely true. But if he wasn’t writing the things he did he wouldn’t have a column in the New York Times.
That’s the kind of thing that is very hard to perceive. People do not want—or often are not able—to perceive that they are conforming to external authority. They feel themselves to be very free—and indeed they are—as long as they conform. But power lies elsewhere. That’s as old as history in the modern period. It’s often very explicit.
Adam Smith, for example, discussing England, quite interestingly pointed out that the merchants and manufacturers—the economic forces of his day—are the ‘principal architects of policy’, and they make sure that their own interests are ‘most peculiarly attended to’, no matter how grievous the effect on others, including the people in England. And that’s a good principle of statecraft, and social and economic planning, which runs pretty much to the present. When you get people with management and decision-making skills, they can enter into that system and they can make the actual decisions—within a framework that’s set within the real concentrations of power. And now it’s not the merchants and manufacturers of Adam Smith’s day, it’s the multinational corporations, financial institutions, and so on. But, stray too far beyond their concerns and you won’t be the decision-maker.
It’s not a mechanical phenomenon, but it’s overwhelmingly true that the people who make it to decision-making positions (that is, what they think of as decision-making positions) are those who conform to the basic framework of the people who fundamentally own and run the society. That’s why you have a certain choice of technocratic managers and not some other choice of people equally or better capable of carrying out policies but have different ideas.
What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an individual level? What can we learn about how one views oneself often in positions of power or authority?
You almost never find anyone, whether it’s in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, ‘I’m really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.’ Almost invariably you get noble rhetoric like: ‘We’re working for the benefit of the people.’ The corporate executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and community; the friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start their business; the political leader who’s trying to bring freedom and justice to the world—and they probably all believe it. I’m not suggesting that they’re lying. There’s an array of routine justifications for whatever you’re doing. And it’s easy to believe them. It’s very hard to look into the mirror and say, ‘Yeah, that guy looking at me is a vicious criminal.’ It’s much easier to say, ‘That guy looking at me is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things because it’s for the benefit of everyone.’
Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called ‘the theologian of the establishment’. And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it’s what you do if you’re an intellectual). But what it came down to is that, ‘Even if you try to do good, evil’s going to come out of it; that’s the paradox of grace’. —And that’s wonderful for war criminals. ‘We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.’ And it’s influential. So, I don’t think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. —Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they’re doing, they’ll say: ‘We’re trying to preserve the peace of the world.’ People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice’, and so on.
But, we don’t take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They’ll give you the same answers. But, we don’t take that seriously because they can know what they’re doing if they choose to. If they choose not to, that’s their choice. If they choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that’s their choice. But it doesn’t change the moral responsibility. We understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It’s very hard to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.
In fact, one of the—maybe the most—elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, If something’s right for me, it’s right for you; if it’s wrong for you, it’s wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he’d be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It’s not even discussable. Because we don’t apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.
There’s a lot of talk about ‘terror’ and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it’s considered highly moral; it’s considered self-defense, and so on. Now, their terror against us, that’s awful, and terrible, and so on.
But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because that means accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that’s accepted, either in personal or political life. Very rarely.
Looking at Nuremberg and the Culture of Torture
What about criminal responsibility and intellectuals? Nuremberg is an interesting precedent.
The Nuremberg case is a very interesting precedent. First of all, the Nuremberg trials—of all the tribunals that have taken place, from then until today—it is, I think, the most serious by far. But, nevertheless, it was very seriously flawed. And it was recognized to be. When Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor, wrote about it, he recognized that it was flawed, and it was so for a number of fundamental reasons. For one thing, the Nazi war criminals were being tried for crimes that had not yet been declared to be crimes. So, it was ex post facto. ‘We’re now declaring these things you did to be crimes.’ That is already questionable.
Secondly, the choice of what was considered a crime was based on a very explicit criterion, namely, denial of the principle of universality. In other words, something was called a crime at Nuremberg if they did it and we didn’t do it.
So, for example, the bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a crime. The bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and so on—those aren’t crimes. Why? Because we did them. So, therefore, it’s not a crime. In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did. Admiral Doenitz, a submarine commander who was involved in all kinds of war crimes, called in the defense a high official in the British admiralty and, I think, Admiral Nimitz from the United States, who testified that, ‘Yeah, that’s the kind of thing we did.’ And, therefore, they weren’t sentenced for these crimes. Doenitz was absolved. And that’s the way it ran through. Now, that’s a very serious flaw. Nevertheless, of all the tribunals, that’s the most serious one.
When Chief Justice Jackson, chief counsel for the prosecution, spoke to the tribunal and explained to them the importance of what they were doing, he said, to paraphrase, that: ‘We are handing these defendants a poisoned chalice, and if we ever sip from it we must be subject to the same punishments, otherwise this whole trial is a farce.’ Well, you can look at the history from then on, and we’ve sipped from the poisoned chalice many times, but it’s never been considered a crime. So, that means we are saying that trial was a farce.
Interestingly, in Jackson’s opening statement he claimed that the defense did not wish to incriminate the whole German populace from whence the defendants came, for the crimes they committed, but only the “planners and designers” of those crimes, “the inciters and leaders without whose evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the violence and lawlessness…of this terrible war.”
That’s correct. And that’s another principle which we flatly reject. So, at Nuremberg, we weren’t trying the people who threw Jews into crematoria; we were trying the leaders. When we ever have a trial for crimes it’s of some low-level person—like a torturer from Abu Ghraib—not the people who were setting up the framework from which they operate. And we certainly don’t try political leaders for the crime of aggression. That’s out of the question. The invasion of Iraq was about as clear-cut a case of aggression than you can imagine. In fact, by the Nuremberg principles, if you read them carefully, the U.S. war against Nicaragua was a crime of aggression for which Ronald Reagan should have been tried. But, it’s inconceivable; you can’t even mention it in the West. And the reason is our radical denial of the most elementary moral truisms. We just flatly reject them. We don’t even think we reject them, and that’s even worse than rejecting them outright.
I mean, if we were able to say to ourselves, ‘Look, we are totally immoral, we don’t accept elementary moral principles,’ that would be a kind of respectable position in a certain way. But, when we sink to the level where we cannot even perceive that we’re violating elementary moral principles and international law, that’s pretty bad. But that’s the nature of the intellectual culture—not just in the United States—but in powerful societies everywhere.
You mentioned Doenitz escaping culpability for his crimes. Two who didn’t escape punishment and were among the most severely punished at Nuremberg were Julius Streicher, an editor of a major newspaper, and—also an interesting example—Dr. Wolfram Sievers of the Ahnenerbe Society’s Institute of Military Scientific Research, whose own crimes were traced back to the University of Strasbourg. Not the typical people prosecuted for international war crimes, it seems, given their civilian professions.
Yeah; and there’s a justification for that, namely, those defendants could understand what they were doing. They could understand the consequences of the work that they were carrying out. But, of course, if we were to accept this awful principle of universality, that would have a pretty long reach—to journalists, university researchers, and so on.
Let me quote for you the mission statement of the Army Research Office. This “premier extramural” research agency of the Army is grounded upon “developing and exploiting innovative advances to insure the Nation’s technological superiority.” It executes this mission “through conduct of an aggressive basic science research program on behalf of the Army so that cutting-edge scientific discoveries and the general store of scientific knowledge will be optimally used to develop and improve weapons systems that establish land-force dominance.”
This is a pentagon office, and they’re doing their job. In our system, the military is under civilian control. Civilians assign a certain task to the military: their job is to obey, and carry the role out, otherwise you quit. That’s what it means to have a military under civilian control. So, you can’t really blame them for their mission statement. They’re doing what they’re told to do by the civilian authorities. The civilian authorities are the culpable ones. If we don’t like those policies (and I don’t, and you don’t), then we go back to those civilians who designed the framework and gave the orders.
You can, as the Nuremberg precedents indicated, be charged with obeying illegal orders, but that’s often a stretch. If a person is in a position of military command, they are sworn, in fact, to obey civilian orders, even if they don’t like them. If you say they’re really just criminal orders, then, yes, they can reject them, and get into trouble and so on. But this is just carrying out the function that they’re ordered to carry out. So, we go straight back to the civilian authority and then to the general intellectual culture, which regards this as proper and legitimate. And now we’re back to universities, newspapers, the centers of the doctrinal system.
It’s just the forthright honesty of the mission statement which is also very striking, I think.
Well, it’s like going to an armory and finding out they’re making better guns. That’s what they’re supposed to do. Their orders are, ‘Make this gun work better.’, and so they’re doing it. And, if they’re honest, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re doing; that’s what the civilian authorities told us to do.’
At some point, people have to ask, ‘Do I want to make a better gun?’ That’s where the Nuremberg issues arise. But, you really can’t blame people very severely for carrying out the orders that they’re told to carry out when there’s nothing in the culture that tells them there’s anything wrong with it. I mean, you have to be kind of like a moral hero to perceive it, to break out of the cultural framework and say, ‘Look, what I’m doing is wrong.’ Like somebody who deserts from the army because they think the war is wrong. That’s not the place to assign guilt, I think. Just as at Nuremberg. As I said, they didn’t try the SS guards who threw people into crematoria, at Nuremberg. They might have been tried elsewhere, but not at Nuremberg.
But, in this case, the results of the ARO’s mission statement in harvesting scholarly work for better weapons design, it’s professors, scholars, researchers, scientific designers, etc., who have these choices to focus serious intellectual effort and to be so used for such ends, and who aren’t acting necessarily from direct orders but are acting more out of freewill.
It’s freewill, but don’t forget that there’s a general intellectual culture that raises no objection to this.
Let’s take the Iraq war. There’s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking ‘What should we do?’, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that ‘carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows’ (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere. —I mean, you can find it. I’ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that’s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that ‘to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows’?
So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who’s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice—they’re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can’t. Because our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.
And take Iran. Both political parties—and practically the whole press—accept it as legitimate and, in fact, honorable, that ‘all options are on the table’, presumably including nuclear weapons, to quote Hilary Clinton and everyone else. ‘All options are on the table’ means we threaten war. Well, there’s something called the U.N. Charter, which outlaws ‘the threat or use of force’ in international affairs. Does anybody care? Actually, I saw one op-ed somewhere by Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist close to the government, who pointed out that threats are serious violations of international law. But that’s so rare that when you find it it’s like finding a diamond in a pile of hay or something. It’s not part of the culture. We’re allowed to threaten anyone we want—and to attack anyone we want. And, when a person grows up and acts in a culture like that, they’re culpable in a sense, but the culpability is much broader.
I was just reading a couple days ago a review of a new book by Steven Miles, a medical doctor and bioethicist, who ran through 35,000 pages of documents he got from the Freedom of Information Act on the torture in Abu Ghraib. And the question that concerned him is, ‘What were the doctors doing during all of this?’ All through those torture sessions there were doctors, nurses, behavioral scientists and others who were organizing them. What were they doing when this torture was going on? Well, you go through the detailed record and it turns out that they were designing and improving it. Just like Nazi doctors.
Robert Jay Lifton did a big study on Nazi doctors. He points out in connection with the Nazi doctors that, in a way, it’s not those individual doctors who had the final guilt, it was a culture and a society which accepted torture and criminal activities as legitimate. The same is true with the tortures at Abu Ghraib. I mean, just to focus on them as if they’re somehow terrible people is just a serious mistake. They’re coming out of a culture that regards this as legitimate. Maybe there are some excesses you don’t really do but torture in interrogation is considered legitimate.
There’s a big debate now on, ‘Who’s an enemy combatant?’; a big technical debate. Suppose we invade another country and we capture somebody who’s defending the country against our invasion: what do you mean to call them an ‘enemy combatant’? If some country invaded the United States and let’s say you were captured throwing a rock at one of the soldiers, would it be legitimate to send you to the equivalent of Guantanamo, and then have a debate about whether you’re a ‘lawful’ or ‘unlawful’ combatant? The whole discussion is kind of, like, off in outer space somewhere. But, in a culture which accepts that we own and rule the world, it’s reasonable. But, also, we should go back to the roots of the intellectual or moral culture, not just to the individuals directly involved.
As you mentioned before, whether students are taught serious moral principles: At my school, the University of Arizona, there are courses in bioethics—required ones, in fact, to hard scientific undergraduates (I took one, out of interest)— which mostly just discuss scenarios in terms of ‘slippery slopes’ and hypothetical questions within certain bounds, and still none at all in the social sciences or humanities. Do you think there should be? Would that be beneficial?
If they were honest, yes. If they’re honest they’d be talking about what we’re talking about, and doing case studies. There’s no point pontificating about high minded principles. That’s easy. Nazi doctors could do that, too.
Let’s take a look at the cases and ask how the principles apply—to Vietnam; to El Salvador; to Iraq; to Palestine—just run through the cases and see how the principles apply to our own actions. That’s what is of prime importance, and what is least discussed.
As a note to end on, there seems to be some very serious aberrations and defects in our society and our level of culture. How, in your view, might they be corrected and a new level of culture be established, say, one in which torture isn’t accepted? (After all, slavery and child labor were each accepted for a long period of time and now are not.)
Your examples give the answer to the question, the only answer that has ever been known. Slavery and child labor didn’t become unacceptable by magic. It took hard, dedicated, courageous work by lots of people. The same is true of torture, which was once completely routine.
If I remember correctly, the renowned Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie wrote somewhere that prisons began to proliferate in Norway in the early 19th century. They weren’t much needed before, when the punishment for robbery could be driving a stake through the hand of the accused. Now it’s perhaps the most civilized country on earth.
There has been a gradual codification of constraints against torture, and they have had some effect, though only limited, even before the Bush regression to savagery. Alfred McCoy’s work reviews that ugly history. Still, there is improvement, and there can be more if enough people are willing to undertake the efforts that led to large-scale rejection of slavery and child labor—still far from complete.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
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