See Democracy Now!.

I find it tragic that we’re talking about cutting Medicare and Social Security in this environment, when we, first of all, don’t really need a budget-balancing plan right now. The budget-balancing plan we need in the future is really related to the rise in healthcare costs. Healthcare costs will drive up Medicare most. And I read in the newspapers again today analyses about long-term budget deficits ignoring the fact that it’s basically all Medicare and Medicaid driven by rising healthcare costs in general. The problem is very clear: we’ve got to reform the healthcare system. That is America’s major domestic problem….

The idea of taking it out on people over 65, Medicare, or very poor people getting Medicaid, or Social Security, which in many minds is inadequate to begin with—I mean, there’s some nonsense around that we have a generous public retirement plan—it’s very disturbing. America has lost its way….I’ve always been in favor of Medicare for all. People love Medicare. You know, one of the other ironies in this is that Medicare is excoriated by the Republicans and the right wing. And you ask people whether they want to lose their Medicare, no way. Medicare could work very well. And a nation—Medicare for all could work very well. A Medicare operation that began to negotiate on budget—on drug costs and on the kinds of services they pay for in a rational way could make this healthcare system work. We’ve got to deal with that, and we’re simply not. I don’t think Obamacare is enough. Not bad, but not enough….

There’s never any discussion of the level to which U.S. military wars abroad have created so much a part of the huge deficit, and now the Republicans are complaining about it. But 10 years of war has to be paid for, but no one wants to talk about that expenditure…. We just can’t go on fighting wars as if it’s costless to us, and we seem to think it is.

Check out Democracy Now! and ALEC exposed for insights on just how it seems the John Birch Society is finally winning. Barry Goldwater and Robert Welch would be very pleased.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), formed nearly four decades ago, has become, in its own words, “the nation’s largest, non-partisan, individual public-private membership association of state legislators.” ALEC has come under increasing scrutiny in recent months for its role in drafting bills to attack workers’ rights, roll back environmental regulations, privatize education, deregulate major industries, and pass voter ID laws. Thanks to ALEC, at least a dozen states have recently adopted a nearly identical resolution asking Congress to compel the Environmental Protection Agency to stop regulating carbon emissions.

by Chris Hedges,
interviewed by David Barsamian
Santa Fe, NM
18 May 2011
available from Alternative Radio

Chris Hedges is an award-winning journalist who has covered wars in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Central America. He writes a weekly column for Truthdig.org and is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute. He is the author of American Fascists, Empire of Illusion, Death of the Liberal Class, and The World As It Is.

I love your answer to the question of how you transitioned from Harvard Divinity School to The New York Times.

I didn’t go directly from Harvard Divinity School to The New York Times. I began as a free-lance reporter. That’s an important distinction, because people who rise through the ranks of The New York Times become vetted, conditioned, harassed, formed, shaped by the institution. And that never happened to me. Which, of course, led to my problems eventually with The New York Times.

So I would write compulsively, like most writers, published my first piece in a historical journal when I was 14, published my first piece in a major American newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, when I was in college, but could not reconcile the social activism, in particular of my father, who was a Presbyterian minister, and the idea of impartiality and neutrality and objectivity in American journalism.

That bridge was really made for me in my second year of Harvard Divinity School, where I was studying to be a minister, when I met a guy named Robert Cox, who had been the editor of the Buenos Aires Herald during the dirty war in Argentina. Bob had printed the names of the disappeared, those who had been disappeared the day before, above the fold on his newspaper, which eventually led to the death squads’ coming and disappearing him. He survived largely because he’s a British citizen and the British government intervened to get him out, later knighted him. Bob was at Harvard. It was a kind of awakening to me to see what great journalism can and should do.

I went off to Latin America at a time when there were horrible regimes. Pinochet was in Chile, the junta in Argentina, the death squads in El Salvador were killing between 700 and 1,000 people a month, Ríos Montt was in Guatemala. And I thought that it was as close as my generation was going to come to fighting fascism, like my hero, Orwell. So that was the transition from a seminarian from a household that was active in social justice into journalism. Those were my roots. And those were roots that eventually, although I ended up at The New York Times, led to a conflict with The New York Times.

What you said was that you went from one godless institution to another.

Harvard Divinity School has probably proudly produced more atheists than any other divinity school in the country, that’s true.

When you were at Harvard, you were living in Roxbury, and that was a formative experience for you. What did you learn there?

That was extremely important experience for me. And maybe, when I look back at my life, one of the most important experiences, because I lived across the street from the main Mission Main Extension housing project, which at the time was one of the worst projects in Roxbury. It’s since been leveled and rebuilt. But they had a 60% vacancy rate, no security. All the locks on the doors in the apartment complexes had been broken. Just to walk in these unlit, urine-filled halls was exceedingly dangerous.

It was important for me to live in Roxbury and grasp a couple things. One is how institutional forms of racism and repression work. These internal ghettos, how they function, how we make sure that one generation of poor remain poor into the next generation and the succeeding generation through the collapse of all kind of institutions, whether it’s the courts, whether it’s banking, whether it’s the educational system. And then, if you live among the poor, you can’t romanticize the poor. One of the writers I like is Louis-Ferdinand Céline, although he was a fascist, because he had that very hard-headed kind of view. He also was a doctor practicing in the slums of Paris.

One of my problems with Harvard Divinity School and the liberal church was that they had very romantic visions of people they never met. They liked the poor, but they didn’t like the smell of the poor. They talked about empowering people whom they didn’t know. I at once developed a very hard-headed view of poverty and what it does to individuals and at the same time had a window into the hypocrisy of liberal institutions. When I went to divinity school, it was very popular among leftists to go down to Nicaragua and pick coffee for two weeks, which many of my classmates did. And yet they wouldn’t take the 20-minute ride on the Green Line over to Roxbury to see where people in their own city were being warehoused little better than animals. So I always say that Harvard Divinity School is where I learned to hate liberals. I should also add that I was, not surprisingly, a fairly high- testosterone, rebellious young man, and during those two and a half years I was a member of the Greater Boston Alliance boxing team. I used to box for $25 a fight in places like Charlestown. So most of the friends that I hung out with were, in fact, boxers who were dish washers and construction workers.

So, yes, I think it’s extremely important for those of us who don’t grow up in those kinds of depressed, impoverished milieus to spend significant time in them, because we can’t learn to fight on behalf of the poor if we don’t have a very realistic appraisal of what these impoverished enclaves are like and what the effects of these enclaves are on the people who live there.

Tell me a bit about your father, who was a minister in upstate New York. I can sort of see you as a young kid going around with him and after every sermon kind of interrogating him about what he had said.

That’s exactly what happened. He had five churches in rural Schoharie County in upstate New York. He would consolidate two of the services, so he would preach the same sermon three times. And I often went with him on this kind of circuit. I didn’t hear the sermon three times, but in between I would grill him on it. My father wasn’t a great intellectual, but he was a great minister and a great man and had the kind of wisdom that comes with being a parish minister for 40 years by the time he retired.

I remember once as a teenager—when somebody would die in the town, my father would go and spend the day at the house of the family with the bereaved. And I remember asking him once, “What do you say?” And he said, “Mostly I just make the coffee.” And I remember as a teenager sort of rolling my eyes and thinking, That’s my dad, when in fact years later I realized that there was a profound kind of wisdom that in the face of death there is nothing to say and that it was primarily his presence that was called for.

And did he share what you found at Harvard, a certain romanticization of the poor as well?

My father had no real understanding of the inner-city poor. The county we lived in was very poor, and my father was a champion for the poor. We had probably mixed- race. But the poor whites in our county were derisively referred to as “slouters.” I’m not sure where the term comes from. But they were probably mixed Indian- African American, and they lived in segregated parts of the town. We had a horrible principal at the high school. The kids would sometimes be unruly. And he would expel them from the high school and not allow them back into the high school. My father was a champion on their behalf, and he clashed so much with that principal that they finally passed a restraining order that my dad wasn’t allowed on the high school property, because he just went ballistic. The education of these children, because they were poor, was terminated at the whim or capriciousness of a heartless administrator.

My father came from money; he was a product of the upper middle class. To the day he died, he was dressed in Brooks Brothers suits. So, yes, I would say that my understanding of the darkness of poverty and how that darkness visits itself on human beings was probably not viscerally something he understood.

What kind of influence did your mother have on you?

My mother was the intellectual of the family. She was an English professor. And I am a mix of the two. My father, although, of course, highly educated, I wouldn’t describe him as first and foremost an intellectual. My mother was intellectual. So I got a marriage of the two.

Did your love of the classics—and you’re very steeped in classical literature—stem from your mother?

No. She taught mostly the canon of American literature. Neither of my parents was particularly well versed in the classics. My father had study biblical Greek, but he was by no means a classic scholar. That was a path that was provided to me by Harvard, which I took, and which I relished and loved. But I would say that that came from great classics professors at Harvard.

Talk about getting Death of the Liberal Class published. It was a bit of an odyssey. You started at Knopf. And then what happened?

Well, I turned the manuscript in to Knopf and they didn’t like it. I do believe that the collapse of the traditional media is catastrophic for our democracy, but I wasn’t about to mythologize it. I understand its deep, structural flaws, and the lies it tells, which are primarily, but not always, the lies of omission, and I wasn’t going to leave that out. Knopf offered to publish the book but they said that an editor was going to “take out all the negativity,” which, of course, I wasn’t going to accept. I had been paid half my advance, and I had Nation Books buy the entire book for that half that I had been paid and publish it.

But that transition between Knopf and Nation Books was one where I began to reflect that the press doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s one of the pillars of the liberal establishment. The reason the press doesn’t cover labor is because labor has atrophied. Labor as a force in American political life largely doesn’t exist. So I wanted to write about all of the traditional pillars of the liberal establishment, not just the press, but liberal religious institutions, public education, in particular, universities like City College, culture, labor, and, of course, the Democratic Party, and show how the foundations of the liberal state have been degraded or destroyed. And the press is part of that story. So it became a broader and, I think, better book because of that interlude.

And Knopf is part of the Bertelsmann conglomerate.

It’s a huge corporation in its own right. And these corporations, the executives who run them, couldn’t tell a good book from a bad book if you put a gun to their head. The only thing they know are numbers. It’s why they constantly seek out celebrity-driven books. At the time, the editor I was working with was working with Tony Blair. I think Blair got something like $4 million for his book, which we now know is not only filled with self- congratulatory crap but, frankly, completely made-up interviews. But that’s what they like, because it’s all about money. It’s not about actually producing books that have any kind of longevity or any kind of intrinsic worth. And the people who work there don’t even have the literary and intellectual capacity to know whether the book has any worth. I had been with Simon & Schuster Free Press before. I had been through this. It’s really frustrating. The corporatization of just about every aspect of American life, including the publishing industry, is at its core an assault on culture. It’s about the destruction of culture.

You land up at the most prestigious paper in the country, The New York Times, in 1990. You’ve alluded to the problems you had with the editorial staff. When did you start noticing them?

I was very far away from the mother ship for my career, but I had problems almost from the beginning, because I was sent to cover the first Gulf War, and I wouldn’t embed. We all were forced to sign documents by the military when we got off the plane in Dhahran saying that we would in essence be servants of the military. We were, first of all, in Saudi Arabia, we weren’t in the U.S., but the paper reduced us to little more than propagandists. The next day I just threw the paper in the trash and went out on my own to a town called Khafji and started writing stories.

It pleased the paper, because they were getting stuff that was outside of the pool and outside the approved stories that were managed and controlled by the military. But it really angered the other reporters who were there who had been good little boys and girls and done what the military had told them. So they actually wrote a letter—I was a new reporter—to the foreign editor saying that because of my defiance of the rules, I was ruining our relationship with the military. I’m not a careerist, I never really gave a damn about my career, and I thought that was the end. But R. W. Apple, who was running the coverage at the time, interceded on my behalf, and in fact, when he found out about the letter, called all the reporters in and dressed them down. Johnny Apple had covered Vietnam. He said, “You know, we don’t work for the U.S. military.” But without Johnny’s intercession I would have been shipped back to New York in some disgrace and probably wouldn’t have been able to further my career. As it turns out, the collection of stories that I wrote on the Gulf War were chosen by the paper for their submission for the Pulitzer that year, didn’t win it.

So I was sent very quickly overseas. There is a kind of strange phenomenon within institutions like The New York Times: the closer you get to the epicenters of power, like Washington or New York, the more you acquiesce to the needs and the desires of those centers of power. The further you are away, the more latitude and freedom you have. So I made sure that throughout my career I never—for instance, I wouldn’t do the press briefings by Schwarzkopf. I preferred to be out interviewing lance corporals up on the front line, which is mostly what I did. That means you don’t write the big policy pieces, you don’t have access to the senior officials. But that never interested me in journalism.

And because The New York Times is an institution that attracts careerists, who are attracted to power and access, this gave me a kind of free hand. The kind of work that I wanted to do, most of the other reporters didn’t want to do. I constantly volunteered to go to Gaza, spent months in my life in Gaza, and the other reporters had no interest in going to Gaza. I volunteered to go to Sarajevo. And when I did, the then executive editor, Joseph Lelyveld, said, “Well, I guess the line starts and ends with you.” So the things that I cared about, the things that I wanted to report, I had very little competition within the institution to report them.

My clash with the paper came when I came back. I had written War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, so I was on programs like Charlie Rose. And because I had been the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times, I would be asked about the impending invasion of Iraq, and I denounced it quite strongly. And this led me to conflict with the paper.

But for me, I was always consistent. I’ve had people ask me, “Is that a kind of metamorphosis?” Or “When did you change?” I never changed. I placed myself in places like Sarajevo or Gaza so that I could do the kind of reporting I wanted, which was not doing lunch, which was not sucking up to officials, but writing off the street. That sort of gritty, day-to-day, almost cop kind of reporting where you would go out and get a story, that’s pretty much what my career was. I wasn’t writing the big thumb- sucking analytical pieces. I did very, very little of that.

To fast-forward to 2003, you gave the commencement at a college in Illinois. Apparently that rubbed the editors in New York the wrong way. Why?

Because I was booed off the stage. The Progressive actually ran a transcript of the whole talk with, in italics, what people shouted. So I got lynched, the same way cable news lynched Howard Dean or Jeremiah Wright, all these figures. So the paper had to respond, or they were pressured to respond, and they responded by calling me into the office and giving me a formal written reprimand for impugning the impartiality of The New York Times. We were Guild, I was Guild, and the process is that you give the employee a written warning, and then, under Guild rules, the next time the employee violates that warning, you can fire them. So once I was handed that written warning, it was terminal, because I wasn’t about to stop speaking out against the Iraq war. And I approached Hamilton Fish at The Nation Institute about becoming a senior fellow there and leaving the Times. I did leave the Times; I wasn’t fired. But if I had stayed long enough, I would have been fired. That was inevitable.

One of the interesting things that happened in the Times was their extensive coverage of Jason Blair’s transgressions. He was their reporter who fabricated information in his stories. Front page. Thousands and thousands of words. His articles were parsed sentence by sentence. I always contrast that with the paper’s short apologia below the fold, inside the paper about how they got the Iraq war wrong.

Well, of course, because the failure to report or, let’s put it this way, the decision on the part of The New York Times to become a propaganda arm of the Bush White House for the Iraq war, exposed tremendous structural flaws within the institution. Look, I can’t stand Judy Miller and I hate to defend her, even obliquely. But the fact is, she was a scapegoat. This was an institutional failing; it wasn’t a failing of one reporter. They did single her out. But they can’t go there, because it would be to ask questions about their whole modus operandi, how they see themselves as a player within the establishment. They, of course, defined their worth based on their ability to have access to the powerful. All of this stuff would have had to have been called into question. And they weren’t capable of doing that.

The big failing of The New York Times is that it treats with deference centers of power that no longer should be treated with deference. When you had a ruling elite that was somewhat accountable to a demos, or a democratic populace, then those institutions were worthy of some kind of deference. Now, we have financial and political institutions that are wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate state and criminal enterprises in many cases—Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Bank of America. Yet the Times continues to treat them with a kind of deference they don’t deserve. That is at its core the real failing of the paper and why it was able to disseminate the lies handed out by Lewis “Scooter” Libby and Dick Cheney and others, why it completely missed the financial meltdown. Because it should have been in low-income neighborhoods interviewing people who had been given mortgage agreements that they had no hope of ever paying. Instead, they were running down and interviewing Robert Rubin at Citibank. So that in a way, because their sense of identity is built around access, it’s become their Achilles heel. At some kind of fundamental level they lack common sense. It’s been very destructive to the integrity and credibility of the paper. I read the paper every day. For all its flaws, I’m a devoted reader. I certainly do not want to see The New York Times go down. But, unfortunately, the people running the paper have not been able to confront the new political reality that exists.

You live in New Jersey. Perhaps that state’s most famous son, if you will, is Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University, two-time president of the United States. You call him “a very dark figure” in U.S. history. Why?

Because he created the first system of modern mass propaganda, the Committee for Public Information, or the Creel Commission, as it was known popularly, to justify America’s entry into World War I, which had very little popular support. Wilson had run in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” but Wall Street and the bankers, especially with the collapse of the eastern front with czarist Russia, were terrified that if the Germans won the war—and there was a real possibility that they could win the war—all of the massive loans that they had provided to the British and the French would not be repaid. So Wilson dragged us into the war and created this amazing system, massive, first of all—its own news division, its own film division, making films out of Hollywood like The Kaiser, the Beast of Berlin, speakers’ bureaus—but, most important, employing the techniques of mass or crowd psychology employed by Le Bon, Trotter, and, of course, Sigmund Freud. And you have Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew twice over, coming out of the Creel Commission and going straight to Madison Avenue, the father of modern public relations. They understood that people were moved and manipulated by emotion, not by fact, not by reason. And they very skillfully employed these techniques to not only promote the war but break the back of socialist, radical, populist movements that had opposed the war. Socialists, anarchists, communists all became demonized.

And the legacy that Wilson left for us is this culture of permanent war, this culture of fear. So that on the day the war ends the dreaded Hun becomes the dreaded Red. You use this fear to not only destroy your populist forces—because, remember, the liberal class at one point was a political center in the political establishment. That was its function, to make incremental or piecemeal reform possible. That was its role. But you destroy the popular movements which hold fast to moral imperatives and which were the true correctives to American democracy—the labor movement, the suffragette movement, the civil rights movement, the abolitionist movement—and then you disembowel the liberal institutions themselves by going after anybody who is purportedly soft on communism. So essentially what you do over time is what we’ve done, which is to render the society defenseless against rapacious corporate business interests that have shattered all kinds of regulations and controls. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered, unregulated capitalism is a revolutionary force. We are living in the midst of it. They have carried out a coup d’etat in slow motion. And it’s over, they’ve won. Wilson I think was the starting point for this.

Few realize the extent of the popularity of the left in that period. Appeal to Reason had something like 700,000 subscribers, 4 million readers. You had people like Eugene Debs getting a huge number of votes.

Right. Even in prison in 1920 he pulls almost 1 million votes. And it’s destroyed the language by which we can understand what’s happening to us. People don’t even have the vocabulary of class warfare to get it. The fact that buffoonish, amoral, shallow people like Donald Trump or Warren Buffet or any of these figures can be held up as icons shows you how far our descent is. Dwight Macdonald, whom I admire very much, said that the war was the rock on which these progressive movements broke. And I think that’s right.

So that the harsher tactics of the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act, because of the effectiveness of the propaganda—and this was something that Walter Lippmann laid out in Public Opinion—and how you manufacture consent, had to be very rarely employed. They were used against Debs to put him in prison. But in most cases—and Randolph Bourne and Jane Addams write about this—even the intellectual class—and it wasn’t just the masses that were seduced by this propaganda, but the intellectual classes as well. And then the remnants of these movements in the aftermath of World War I, like the Wobblies, the old CIO, Emma Goldman, then they used, through the Palmer Raids and deportations, the harsher forms of state control to eradicate those that have stood fast to these moral principles.

With the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s we saw a resurgence somewhat of these movements, which made the New Deal possible, and you saw liberal figures, like Roosevelt, or his vice president, Henry Wallace. That was the last—you could argue on a limited scale the civil rights movement, but that was the last great gasp of liberalism. And everything since, starting with the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 has been a destruction or a dismantling of the advances that we made in popular democracy through the New Deal.

Hitler wrote admiringly about the propaganda efforts in Mein Kampf. Hitler admired the war propaganda, yes, that’s right. But more important, Goebbels considered Edward Bernays’ book Propaganda one of the seminal texts in creating their own propaganda.

Talk about bread and circuses as a method of control. It seems to me that there is less and less bread nowadays, literally, and more and more circuses.

The purpose of bread and circuses is, as Neil Postman said in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, to distract, to divert emotional energy towards the absurd and the trivial and the spectacle while you are ruthlessly stripped of power.

I used to wonder, is Huxley right or is Orwell right? It turns out they’re both right. First you get the new world state and endless diversions and hedonism and the cult of the self as you are disempowered. And then, as we are watching, credit dries up, the cheap manufactured goods of the consumer society are no longer cheap. Then you get the iron fist of Oceania, of Orwell’s 1984. That’s precisely the process that’s happened. We have been very effectively pacified by the pernicious ideology of a consumer society, which is centered around the cult of the self, kind of undiluted hedonism and narcissism. That became a very effective way to divert our attention while the country was reconfigured into a kind of neofeudalism, with a rapacious oligarchic elite and an anemic government that no longer was able to intercede on behalf of citizens but now cravenly serves the interests of the oligarchy itself.

Your work is replete with references to poetry. For example, you quote Yeats, “We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

That’s what happens. Because when you live in an illusion, when life is all about serving your own personal pleasure, you banish empathy. That’s what the corporate state has done very well—to banish the capacity for empathy. I come out of the religious left, and it was drilled into us, It’s not about you, it’s about your neighbor. True spirituality—King wrote about this, Bonhoeffer wrote about this, Dorothy Day wrote about this, Daniel Berrigan, writes about this—is about justice. It is about justice. And, unfortunately, the left became preoccupied with the pursuits of inclusiveness and multiculturalism and identity politics and forgot the core issue of justice. Not that multiculturalism or these things are bad in and of themselves. But when they’re divorced from justice, especially justice for the poor and working men and women, then it becomes a kind of boutique activism, which is not only largely irrelevant but very easily absorbed, as it has been, into the consumer society itself, because it just creates more consumers.

You look at the huge billboards that Benetton and Calvin Klein put up a few years ago with HIV-positive models and people of color. They function the same way Barack Obama functioned for the corporate state: to give their products a kind of risqué edge and smell of progressive politics. But in the end it did what all these brands do, and that is make consumers confuse a brand with an experience. And it’s why, when Barack Obama wins the presidency, Advertising Age gives him its top annual award, Marketer of the Year. He beat Nike, Apple, Zappos. Because the professionals know damn well what he did and who he is.

He also got more corporate money than McCain.

That goes back to Clinton, because Clinton understood that if he did corporate bidding, he would get corporate money. That’s how we got NAFTA, the destruction of welfare, deregulation of the banking system, deregulation of the FCC. He continued to use that feel-your-pain kind of language while serving corporate interests. By the 1990s, the Democrats had fund-raising parity with the Republicans. And by the time Obama ran, they got more.

One more Yeats poem that’s often quoted, “The Second Coming.” “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” I’m wondering about his intent there, and whether that’s really accurate about “the best lack all conviction.”

Yeats is a great poet, and a fascist. He wrote this poem because of a fear of the left, not a fear of the right. Remember, he ended his career writing ditties for the fascist blue shirts in Ireland. But he’s such a fine poet that he captures a kind of truth.

I think we certainly do live in an age where the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. That’s very dangerous, when you have a liberal class that no longer functions. When those people who traditionally defend and care about a civic society no longer do so, then you cede power to very frightening, deformed figures, all of which we are watching leap up around the fringes of our political establishment—this lunatic fringe, which has largely taken over the Republican Party. But I look at it as a fault of the liberal class, that has not responded. So that the legitimate rage on the part of working men and women is directed not only towards government but, I think quite correctly, directed towards liberals, who speak in a very hypocritical language of caring about their interests and yet support political systems—and, in particular, the Democratic Party—that have done nothing since 1994, with the passage of NAFTA, but carry out an assault against working men and women.

You talk critically about brand Obama. You’ve written about Cornel West who is emblematic of many on the so- called progressive left expressing disappointment and disillusionment.

The disappointment with Obama comes from people who don’t understand the structure of power. The charade of politics is to make voters think that the personal narrative of the candidate in any way affects the operation of the corporate state. This is why Sheldon Wolin’s book Democracy Incorporated is important, which was written in 2004. He makes it quite plain that it doesn’t really matter on the fundamental issues whether it’s Republican or Democratic. The imperial projects will continue, Wall Street will be unimpeded in its malfeasance and criminal activity, social programs will continue to be cut, maybe not at the same rate that they would be cut, i.e., the speed or the acceleration would be greater under a Republican administration, but it’s all headed in the same direction.

It’s interesting because after Cornel’s very harsh critique of Obama, the liberal apologists for Obama have gone after him. They haven’t responded to anything he said, including a piece in The Nation, but it’s character assassination: He’s bitter. It’s a personal slight. That’s what they do. They don’t address any of the issues of the abandonment of working men and women, the abandonment of the poor. He talks about prisons. They won’t address any of those issues. They address Cornel’s character. That is the traditional role of the liberal class, that it sets the parameters by which acceptable debate is defined. And when you cross those parameters, as Cornel did, then you immediately are attacked by liberals and become a pariah.

I spend a fair bit of time in Death of the Liberal Class interviewing and speaking to figures like Nader, Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, Sidney Schanberg from The New York Times, who covered Cambodia and then tried to take on the big real estate developers in New York and got pushed out of the paper, about what happens when you cross those lines. The attackers come out of the very liberal establishment that you were once part of. That’s what’s so fascinating. And, of course, in the end I was a victim of the liberal establishment as well. The figure that I think the traditional self-identified liberal class hates most is not some nut case like Glenn Beck but it’s Noam Chomsky, because Chomsky has made a career of exposing the complicity of the liberal elite with the centers of power. So to challenge the orthodoxy, to challenge the official narrative in a real way and to talk about systematic forms of injustice, is to become banished from the liberal establishment itself.

There was a lot of magical thinking attendant to Obama, that he was somehow the peace candidate. He is bombing Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and continuing the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

He never presented himself as a peace candidate, to be fair to him. This was just wishful thinking on the part of the left. He talked about downsizing in Iraq. But, remember, at the time he was talking about that Afghanistan was the war where we really have to fight. So the failure was not Obama but the fecklessness of the left, who were seduced by the propaganda. They believed somehow that he didn’t really mean what he was saying, that once in office he would carry out a progressive agenda. But if you look at the two-year voting record he had in the Senate, it’s awful. It’s one corporate giveaway after another. There wasn’t a bill he supported that wasn’t an embrace of corporatism. I don’t own a TV, because I don’t need my head filled with this garbage. I got the voting record, I read it, and I made my decision to vote based on that voting record. And that’s what we all should have done. Obama is not even a liberal. The Democratic Party in Europe would be considered a far-right party.

If we don’t hold fast to these moral principles, moral imperatives, nobody’s going to. Politics is a game of fear. We don’t have to have a majority, but once 10, 15, 20 million people start voting left, we’ll scare the piss out of the Democrats, and they’ll have to respond. But they’re not going to respond to us until that happens. We are going to continue this very frightening drift towards what Sheldon Wolin calls the system of inverted totalitarianism. The only thing that’s going to stop it is when we draw a line in the sand and say “Enough!” I’m not sure it’s going to happen this time around. I think any kind of cold analysis of the liberal response would have to concede that this response is not working. We are facing another economic meltdown. The ecosystem, on which the human species depends for life is being destroyed at a rate that has not even been anticipated by climate scientists. We don’t have a lot of time left. So either we get out and fight or we’re finished. But fear is the only thing the Democratic Party has to offer—fear of the other.

We are only going to be further disempowered if we remain afraid. The object should be to make them afraid. As Karl Popper pointed out in The Open Society and Its Enemies, the question is not how you get good people to rule. As Popper points out, most people attracted to power are at best mediocre, which is Obama, or venal, which is Bush. The question is, how do you stop the power elite from doing as much damage to you as possible? That comes through movements. It’s not our job to take power. You could argue that the most powerful political figure in April of 1968 was Martin Luther King, because when he went to Memphis, 50,000 people went with him. And we know Johnson was terrified of him. We have to accept that all of the true correctives to American democracy came through these movements that never achieved formal political power and yet frightened the political establishment enough to respond. The last liberal president we had was Richard Nixon. OSHA, the Mine Safety Act. Not because he was a liberal but because we still had the remnants of movements that scared him. So it’s time to turn your back on the Democrats and begin to regain a new kind of democratic militancy. If we don’t do that, if we remain fearful, then we will be further stripped of power as we barrel towards this neofeudalistic state where there is a world of masters and serfs, where two-thirds of the country lives on a subsistence level, a kind of permanent underclass. That’s what’s happening; that’s what’s being created.

And then you have imperial wars in distant lands. You often cite Thucydides on tyranny—tyranny abroad, tyranny at home.

Imperial power is a disease, because the techniques of imperial power, which is all about not only control through force but the looting of natural resources, not about democracy, the techniques that imperium uses abroad it soon uses at home. That’s what Thucydides wrote, that the tyranny that ancient Athens or the Athenian empire imposed on others, it finally imposed on itself. That what destroyed Athenian democracy, it was destroyed from within. That’s precisely what’s happening. What is Homeland Security? It’s the most intrusive government institution in the history of America. And yet we accept it. We accept it because we’re made afraid of terrorism.

So, yes, the techniques of empire always migrate back home. And the techniques of empire are anathema to democracy. And those most rapacious forces, like Halliburton, make their money off of empire. They make their money in Iraq, they make their money in Afghanistan. It’s all taxpayer money. And then they come back to the U.S. and use that money, through corruption, to reconfigure the political system to their advantage. That is a classic example of what empire does.

Talk about the multiple uprisings in the Middle East, which are classified under the rubric of Arab Spring. Were you surprised at the series of events that evolved?

I was surprised at the timing, but that’s nothing new. For instance, we knew that the pressure on the Palestinians was intense. We didn’t know that when a van full of Palestinian day workers was hit by an Israeli vehicle and several were killed, it would ignite the first intifada. You can’t know that. I was in Leipzig on November 9, 1989, with the leaders of the East German opposition, and they were talking about how maybe within a year they would have free passage back and forth across the wall. A few hours later the wall didn’t exist. You never can know the timing. So that was a surprise.

I think that the Arab Spring—we use all these clichés to make these movements instantly understandable. In fact, the military institutions, which are the problem, still have control both within Tunisia and Egypt. And I think that the other big issue here is food. Commodity prices have been rising. Wheat has risen 100% in the last eight months. When you live on $2 a day, which half of the Egyptian population does, and you’re already spending 50% of your income on food, these kinds of commodity increases are devastating to your ability to feed your family. And we’re seeing that to a lesser extent within the U.S. If you take the roughly 40-45 million Americans who live in poverty, they’re now spending about 35% of their income on food.

I think what we’re really seeing is the breakdown of globalization, the inability of the systems that have been set up by corporations to feed and house the world, to provide adequate income and a decent living. And, of course, it will ripple inwards from the outer reaches of empire. But we’re hardly immune to what’s happening. Look at what’s happening in Greece right now. It’s a good example. All of these things eventually are going to migrate or are already migrating to the U.S. I think we will see these elites, which ruled first through fraud, begin to rule through the much more draconian methods of force. Fraud isn’t working so well anymore.

What’s your assessment of what happened in Madison?

Hopeful. However, it didn’t go far enough. There was no real class consciousness. What they were fighting for was the right to ask for decent working conditions, collective bargaining, which is sort of an indication of how far the labor movement has deteriorated. They didn’t do what they should have done, which is organize general strikes. They invested their faith, courtesy of a bought-off labor establishment of the Democratic Party, in recall, which is not working out real well. We have to undertake a militant and sustained defiance of these systems of power, which means jettison any kind of allegiance to traditional groups of organized labor, as well as the Democratic Party.

Chomsky says there is a significant difference between the uprisings in the Middle East and what’s happening in some communities in the U.S.: in the Middle East people are clamoring for rights they never had, and here they’re trying to defend rights that they won or generations ago were won for them.

And Sheldon Wolin makes that point in Democracy Incorporated, that what we have been fooled into thinking is that the utopian vision of globalization and NAFTA and deindustrialization is somehow progress. Everything we do is sort of defined as progress. When, in fact, Chomsky and Wolin are right, that we should be looking back and seeing that a system that we had set up, however imperfect, was far better than what is being put in place to replace it, and that our battle should be to defend what—let’s be clear—thousands of workers endured tremendous amounts of oppression and even murder to create. The rights that we have—Social Security, the 8-hour workday, an end to child labor, benefits, health insurance—these were paid for with the blood of working men and women.

We need to look back. Of course, the kind of historical amnesia that is fostered by the corporate state does a wonderful job of obliterating whole sections of American history and rewriting it around a mythic kind of version of Horatio Alger and the American Dream and all this kind of stuff. We need to go back and understand what it was that was fought for, the price that was paid to achieve it, and what it’s going to take to—of course, I can’t even say defend it because so much of it has been dismantled—but to get it back.

You wrote speeches for Ralph Nader in his 2008 campaign. At the same time, you’re talking about the electoral system as a charade. I was wondering how you reconcile that. You have also said we must abandon the two-party system and to begin to build a viable socialism. Where do you see in the political landscape out there the roots of that possibility happening?

Nader is a socialist. He just doesn’t use the word “socialism,” but he’s a socialist. I was never under any illusion that Ralph Nader was going to win anything. It was a way to express an opposition and challenge the orthodoxy of the corporate state and corporate media and corporate political parties. It was a recognition that there is no way in this country to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase. And it was a call for defiance. I think that it was an understanding that the two- party system, the corporate duopoly, no longer functions to further the rights or interests of citizens, and that the longer we’re fooled by this belief that reform can come through these formal structures of power, the more disempowered we’re going to become.

You’re arguing along two different tracks. And I don’t mean this as a criticism. I find it interesting because I experience the same thing myself. You say, on one hand, “This time when the empire collapses, it will be global, the whole system will go down with us, we stand on the verge of one of the bleakest periods in human history.” At the same time, you’re saying, “I have hope. Battling injustice allows us to retain our identity in the sense of meaning, and ultimately our freedom. Rebellion should be our natural state.”

If you read carefully, that’s not the same thing as saying we’re going to win. It is an understanding that rebellion becomes a way to protect your own dignity and to keep alive another narrative. Corporations are, theologically speaking, institutions of death. They commodify everything—the natural world, human beings—that they exploit until exhaustion or collapse. They know no limits.

There are no impediments now to corporations. None. But I think that, of course, what they want is for us to give up. They want us to become passive. They want us to become tacitly complicit in our own destruction. Again, although I’m not a particularly religious person, I go back to the religious left that I come out of, that there are moral imperatives to fight back. As Daniel Berrigan says in Death of the Liberal Class, “We’re called to do the good,” or at least the good are insofar as we can determine what it is. And then we have to let it go. It’s not our job to know where the good goes. Faith is a kind of belief that it’s not meaningless, that it goes somewhere. Camus says the same thing. Except, I suppose the difference is that Camus thinks that it goes nowhere. But still you have that moral imperative to rebel. In his book The Rebel that’s what essentially he says.

I think that that’s right. The bleakness of what faces us is difficult to swallow. But as long as we engage in happy platitudes and a false kind of vision of the possible, it may empower you over the short term, but it is eventually, because of the reality in front of us, going to lead to despair and cynicism and apathy. I think it’s better to swallow hard the bitter pill of what we’re up against.

My little 3-year-old looks at books of fish. He loves fish. He’s fascinated. And every time I see it, I think, when he’s my age the fish stocks of the ocean will probably all be dead. The shredding of Kyoto by Obama and corporate figures in the industrialized world in Copenhagen is a retreat into magical thinking, as if we have much time left. Even if we stopped all carbon emissions today, it would still rise to about 500-550 parts per million. And we’re not stopping it.

So I think we’d better grow up. You strive towards a dream. You live within an illusion. We are the most illusioned society on the planet. We have to become adults. And it’s hard, it’s painful. I struggle with despair all the time. But I’m not going to let it win. I don’t have any false illusion that I’m going to build some great populist movement or be part of some great populist movement that’s going to overthrow the corporate state and impose light and goodness. Yet, I think it is incumbent upon all of us that at the same time we recognize how dark the future is, we also recognize the absolute imperative of resistance in every form possible.

In February you had a baby girl. When you look in her eyes, what are you thinking besides love and affection?

Well, that it’s not about me. I’m doing this for them. That even if I fail—look, what is the next generation going to say? What kind of an earth, what kind of a world are we going to leave them. I at least want my children to look back and say, “My daddy was being arrested at the White House fence and booed off commencement stages and he was trying.” Really, at its very core, that’s why I do it. I do it for them. I do it for not just my children but all of those kids, because we betrayed them. Our generation and preceding generations have betrayed them in a very deep way. We should at least have the moral integrity, even if we can’t win, to get up and battle on their behalf. That’s why I do it.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org
©2011

by Robert Jensen,
speech delivered at the Monkey Wrench Bookstore,
Austin, TX,
10 February 2011
available from Alternative Radio

Robert Jensen is professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Citizens of the Empire, The Heart of Whiteness, and All My Bones Shake: Seeking a Progressive Path to the Prophetic Voice.

The Anguish in the American Dream. I believe that to be fully alive today is to live with anguish, not for one’s own condition in the world but for the condition of a broken world. My anguish flows not from the realization that it is getting harder for people to live the American dream but from the recognition that the American dream has made it harder to hold together the living world. So our task tonight is to tell the truth about the domination that I think is at the heart of the American dream so that we may more honestly face the brokenness of our world. Only then can we embrace the anguish of the American dream and confront our moment in history.

Let’s start with the origins of this phrase “the American dream.” A man named James Truslow Adams appears to have been the first to have used the phrase “the American dream” in print, in his 1931 book called The Epic of America. This stockbroker turned historian defined the dream as

that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.

But he didn’t reduce the American dream to materialism, and he emphasized U.S. social mobility in contrast with more rigid European class systems.

It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable and be recognized by others for what they are regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Adams was, in fact, quite concerned about the growing materialism of U.S. life, and he wondered about

the ugly scars which have been left on us by our three centuries of exploitation and conquest of the continent.

Remember, he was writing at the beginning of the Great Depression, coming off the go-go years of the 1920s. So, perhaps not surprisingly, his list of these problems may sound familiar to us, and I’ll quote them at length.

He asks how it was that we came to insist upon business and money-making and material improvement as good in themselves. How they took on the aspects of moral virtues. How we came to consider an unthinking optimism essential. How we refuse to look on the seamy and sordid realities of any situation in which we found ourselves. How we regarded criticism as obstructive and dangerous for our new communities. How we came to think manners undemocratic and a cultivated mind a hindrance to success, a sign of inefficient effeminacy. How the size and statistics of material development came to be more important in our eyes than quality and spiritual values. How, in the ever-shifting advance of the frontier, we came to lose sight of the past in hopes for the future. How we forgot to live in the struggle to make a living. How our education tended to become utilitarian or aimless. And how other unfortunate traits, only too notable today, were developed. A list that seems to be relevant to us today.

For all these concerns, Adams believed that the U.S. could overcome these problems as long as the dream endured. That led him into the dead end of clichés. He says,

If we are to make the dream come true, we must all work together, no longer to build bigger but to build better

For Adams, as the book’s title makes clear, the story of America is an epic and, as he put it,

The epic loses all its glory without the dream.

But I want to argue that dreams of glory are bound to betray us. And 80 years after the question that he is posing we must face whether the story of the United States is an epic or a tragedy. I’ll say more on that later.

Let’s talk about the relationship of the American dream to domination. Adams’ definition of the dream as the belief that life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone is rather abstract. So what do we really mean by the American dream? One historian, who wrote a short history of the idea, highlights the dreams of religious freedom, political independence, racial equality, upward mobility, home ownership, and personal fulfillment that run throughout U.S. history and define the dream. But a concept that is used by so many people, over such a length of time, for so many different purposes is never going to be easily defined. Rather than try to organize all that complexity, I want to focus on what has made the American dream possible. I think that much is rather simple.

The American dream is born of and maintained by domination. By this claim I don’t mean that the American dream is to dominate, although, of course, many who claim to be living the American dream seem to revel in their ability to dominate. What I’m arguing instead is that whatever the specific articulation of the American dream, it is built on domination. I think this is the obvious truth on the surface, the reality that most dreamers want to leave out. Perhaps because it leads to a rather painful question: How deeply woven into the fabric of U.S. society is the domination/subordination dynamic on which this country’s wealth and freedom are based?

Let’s look at the American dream, first the American part. We all understand that the United States of America can dream only because of one of the most extensive acts of genocide in recorded human history. When Europeans landed on this continent, the region that was to eventually include the United States, there were, of course, people here. Population estimates vary, but a conservative estimate is 12 million people north of the Rio Grande, perhaps 2 million in Canada, about 10 million in what is now the continental United States. By the end of the so- called Indian wars, the 1900 census recorded 237,000 indigenous people left alive in the U.S. Depending on the numbers you use, that’s an extermination rate of somewhere between 95% and 99%. That is to say that the European colonists and their heirs, including me, successfully eliminated almost the entire indigenous population, or the “merciless Indian savages,” as they are labeled in the Declaration of Independence, of course one of the most famous articulations of the American dream. That is to say, almost every Indian died in the course of the European invasion to create the United States so that we may dream our dreams. Millions of people died for the crime of being inconveniently located on land desired by Europeans who believed in their right to dominate. This American part of the dream goes on to include African slavery, millions of more people killed in the expansion of the dream. The domination is there at the beginning and continues to this very day.

Second, let’s talk about the dream part of the American dream. Adams pointed out that while the American dream is always about more than money, the idea of getting one’s fair share of the American bounty is also, I think, at the core of the American dream. That bounty, however, did not just drop out of the sky. It was ripped from the ground and drawn from the water in a fashion that has now left the continent ravaged—a dismemberment of nature that is an unavoidable consequence of a world view that glorifies domination.

From the Europeans’ first arrival, we have behaved as if nature must be subdued or ignored,

writes the scientist Wes Jackson, who is one of the leading thinkers in the sustainable agriculture movement. As Jackson points out, our economy has always been extractive, even before the Industrial Revolution dramatically accelerated the assault in the 19th century and the petrochemical revolution began poisoning the world more intensively in the 20th century. From the start, we mined the forests, soil, and aquifers, just as we eventually mined minerals and fossil fuels, leaving ecosystems ragged and in ruin, perhaps beyond recovery in any meaningful human time frame. All that was done by people who believed in their right to dominate. I think this kind of analysis helps us critique the naïve notions of opportunity and bounty in the American dream. The notion of endless opportunity for all in the American dream is routinely invoked by those who seem unconcerned about the inherent inequality in capitalism or those determined to ignore the deeply embedded white
supremacy that expresses itself to this day in institutional and unconscious racism, which constrains indigenous, black, Latino people in the U.S.

The notion of endless bounty in the American dream leads people to believe that because such bounty has always been available, that it will continue to be available through the alleged magic of technology. In America the dreamers want to believe that the domination of people to clear the frontier was acceptable, and now, with that frontier gone, the ever more intense domination of nature to keep the bounty flowing is acceptable. Of course, the U.S. is not the only place in the world where greed has combined with fantasies of superiority to produce horrific crimes. Nor is it the only place where humans have relentlessly degraded ecosystems. But the U.S. is the wealthiest and most powerful country in the history of the world and the country that claims for itself an unique place in history, the so-called “city upon a hill” that serves, in the words of one of our Texas U.S. Senators as “the beacon to the world of the way life should be.”

The American dream is put forward for all the world to adopt, but it clearly can’t be so. Some of the people of the world have had to be sacrificed for that dream, as has the larger living world. Dreams based on domination are by definition limited dreams. Wes Jackson reminds us of how these two forms of domination come together in the U.S. when he tells us,

We are still more the cultural descendants of Columbus and Coronado than we are of the natives we replaced.

Citing the writer Wendell Berry, Jackson points out that

as we came across the continent, cutting the forest and plowing the prairies, we never knew what we were doing because we never knew what we were undoing.

Dreams based on domination by people over the nonhuman world are dreams only for the short term. Dreams based on domination by some people over others are dreams only for the privileged. As Malcolm X put it,

I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream. I see an American nightmare.

A world, I’m arguing, that is based on domination and subordination is inevitably a profoundly unjust world and a fundamentally unsustainable world. So let’s talk a bit about those two ideas.

This is the state of our unjust world. According to World Bank statistics, a third of the people on the planet live on less than $2 per day U.S., while half of the people on the planet live on less than $2.50 a day. That means at least half the people in this world cannot meet basic expenditures for the food, clothing, shelter, health, and education necessary for a minimally decent life. Concern about this is not confined to radical idealists. Consider the judgment of James Wolfenson made near the end of his term as president of the World Bank. Wolfenson said,

It is time to take a cold, hard look at the future. Our planet is not balanced. Too few control too much and many have too little to hope for. Too much turmoil, too many wars, too much suffering. The demographics of the future speak to a growing imbalance of people, resources, and the environment. If we act together now, we can change the world for the better. If we do not, we shall leave greater and more intractable problems for our children.

Let’s take a moment to consider the state of our unsustainable world. Look at any measure of the health of the ecosystems of this continent. I don’t care what measure you look at. Groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of dead zones in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species, and the reduction of biodiversity all suggest we may be past the point of restoration. This warning comes from 1,700 of the world’s leading scientists, who said,

Human beings in the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

That statement was issued in 1992. In the past two decades it’s hard to see evidence that we have changed course.

As a result of this, these days if somebody comes to me and asks for my support for an idea or a project or an institution of some sort, I ask, Will these things make some contribution to the struggle for justice and sustainability? That’s my benchmark question. No one idea, project, or institution, of course, is going to solve all our problems, and perhaps even no combination of them can save us. But I think this is a reasonable question to ask of everything in our lives. On those criteria, the American dream does not fare so well. I have concluded that the American dream is inconsistent with social justice and ecological sustainability, so I am against the American dream. I don’t want to rescue, redefine, or renew the American dream. I want us all to recognize the need to transcend the domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of the American dream. If we can manage that, the dream would fade, as dreams do, when we awaken and come into consciousness. That’s my principled argument.

Let’s consider some questions about political and rhetorical strategy, because, of course, these are important considerations. Let me start by telling you a story about a phone call I got sometime around the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The phone call came from a New York Times reporter who was working on a piece about the antiwar movement’s attempt to rally folks around the idea that peace is patriotic. Remember those bumper stickers? “Peace is Patriotic.” I hate those bumper stickers. I always did. He asked my opinion. And I told him that I never used the phrase and, in fact, that I routinely argued against the concept of patriotism. Instead of trying to redefine patriotism, I wanted to abandon the concept as intellectually, politically, and morally indefensible. This reporter from The New York Times was intrigued and he asked me to explain. Know, this was the first and so far the only time I have been interviewed by a New York Times reporter.

So even though I know the reporters at the newspaper—it’s a tool of the ruling class; that’s well- known—I still couldn’t help but want to make a good impression. So first I pointed out that critiques of patriotism at this fundamental level have been made by radicals in the past for quite a long time and there was nothing all that new in what I was going to say. And then I explained my argument, which is contained in one of the books I wrote, called Citizens of the Empire. He listened patiently and then said he couldn’t see a hole in the argument but that it didn’t really matter. He said, “No one’s going to buy that.” So my position, no matter how compelling, as you can imagine, didn’t end up in his story.

Perhaps I can take some solace in knowing that he thought my argument was correct. But it’s not enough just to be correct. We want also to be effective. So the question I think we should ask is, is an argument irrelevant if it can’t be communicated widely in mainstream culture? And is that the fate of any assault on the idea of an American dream? It’s certainly true that the American dream is a deeply rooted part of the ideology of superiority of the dominant culture. I think there’s evidence all around that this ideology is more deeply entrenched than ever—perhaps precisely because the decline of American power and wealth is so obvious and people are scared and scrambling. But just because an idea can’t be easily communicated to the mainstream I think does not mean we should avoid such radical critiques and simply water things down to play to the mainstream. In fact, I believe this is a time when such critiques are more important than ever.

That analysis stems from an assessment of the political terrain on which I think we operate today. I would argue this is not a mass-movement moment in American history, not a time in which large numbers of Americans are likely to engage in political activity that challenges basic systems of power and wealth. I believe we are in a period in which the most important work is creating the organizations and networks that will be important in the future, when the political conditions will change, for better or worse. Whatever is coming, we are going to need sharper analysis, stronger vehicles for action, and more resilient connections among people.

In short, I think this is a cadre-building moment in history. Although for some people the phrase “cadre building” may invoke the worst of the left’s revolutionary dogmatism, I have something different in mind than that tradition. For me, cadre does not mean vanguard or self- appointed bearers of truth who annoy you endlessly in every meeting. Instead, I think it signals commitment, but with an openness to rethinking theory and practice. And I don’t believe I’m being unrealistic here. I see this kind of organizing in groups that I know of in Austin such as Third Coast Workers for Cooperation, the Workers Defense Project, and Monkey Wrench Books. Perhaps not surprisingly, these are groups that tend to be led by younger people, who are drawing on long-standing radical ideas, updating as needed to fit a changing world. The organizers in this world that I know reject the ideology that comforts the dominant culture. The old folks who are useful in these endeavors I think also are willing to leave behind these chauvinistic stories about American greatness. So to openly challenge the American dream is to signal that we are not afraid to, number one, tell the truth and, number two, keep working in face of significant impediments. This kind of challenge speaks to those who are hungry for honest talk about the depth of our problems and are yearning to be part of a community that perseveres without illusions. That isn’t a majority of the American population, maybe not yet even a significant minority, but those are the people, I think, who have the resolve that we need.

So back to the patriotism critique. Despite the popularity of those “Peace is Patriotic” bumper stickers, I have continued to offer my argument against the concept of patriotism. And whenever I spoke about it in a lecture, people tell me that it was helpful to hear that position articulated in public. Over and over, on this and other issues, I hear people saying that they’ve had such thoughts themselves but have felt isolated, and that hearing the critique in public shores up their sense that they are not crazy. Perhaps these kinds of more radical analyses don’t change the course of existing movements in the moment, but I do think they help bolster those who are at the core of more radical movements that we need, and they do help us identify each other.

A second strategic consideration. Although a radical critique of the American dream isn’t likely to land in The New York Times, any more than a radical critique of patriotism, I don’t think we should ignore the ways we can use such arguments for outreach to liberal and sometimes even conservative communities. Once again let me give you an example from this question of patriotism. I have had conversations with conservative Christians, who are typically among the most hyperpatriotic Americans, in which I’ve challenged them to square that patriotism with their Christian faith. “Isn’t patriotism simply a form of idolatry?” I ask. I can’t claim to have converted large numbers to the anti-empire, anti-capitalist critique yet, but as the Evangelicals say, we sometimes make progress one by one from within, one by one from within, brothers and sisters. But framing questions in a way that forces people to see that conventional politics is at odds with their most deeply held moral principles is a potentially effective strategy in some cases. It doesn’t always work because we all know that humans, including all of us, are known for our ability to hold contradictory ideas at the same time. But I do think this is one resource in an organizer’s toolkit.

So we might consider critiquing the American dream by contrasting it with another widely embraced idea: the Golden Rule, or the ethic of reciprocity, which says we should treat others as we would like to be treated. That principle shows up in virtually all religious teachings and secular philosophy. In Christianity Jesus phrased it this way in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew, chapter 7, verse 12:

So whatever you wish that someone would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets.

One of the best known stories about the great Jewish scholar Hillel from the first century B.C.E. concerns a man who it was said challenged him to “teach me the whole Torah while I stand on one foot.” Hillel responded,

What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn it.

This is echoed in the repeated biblical command in both the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” In Islam one of Prophet Mohammed’s central teachings was,

None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.

In secular Western philosophy, Kant’s categorical imperative is a widely invoked touchstone:

Act only according to the maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it shall become a universal law.

On the surface the American dream of success for all appears to be an articulation of the Golden Rule, of equal opportunity for all. Yet, when we suggest that the two ideas are in fact in opposition, it might give us a chance to make the case that the dream is based on domination and therefore a violation of that core principle. We can ask people how they might reconcile a commitment to an ethic of reciprocity while endorsing a vision of society that leads to an unjust and unsustainable world. How can the least among us today, and our descendants tomorrow, knowing that we turned away from the moral commitments we claim to be most dear to us, ever forgive us. I think a critique of the American dream can open up that conversation.

Let’s go back to this notion of the American dream as an epic or a tragedy. The American dream, of course, typically is illustrated with stories of the heroes who lived the dream. But the larger story of the American dream I think casts the U.S. itself as the hero on a global stage. The question we might ask, somewhat uncomfortably, is the United States an epic hero or a tragic one? Literature scholars argue over definitions of terms like “epic” and “tragedy,” but I think in common usage an epic celebrates the deeds of a hero who is favored by and perhaps even descended from the gods. These heroes overcome adversity to do great things in the service of great causes. Whatever else happens, epic heroes win. A tragic hero loses, but typically not because of an external force. The essence of tragedy is what Aristotle called hamarthia, which is an error in judgment made because of some character flaw, such as hubris. That excessive pride of the protagonist becomes his downfall.

Although some traditions talk about the sin of pride, most of us would agree, probably, that taking some pride in ourselves is psychologically healthy. The problem is excessive pride, when we elevate ourselves and lose a sense of the equal value of others. I think this distinction between pride and excessive pride is crucial in dealing with the American dream, which people often understand in the context of their own hard work and sacrifice. People justifiably take pride, for example, in having worked to start a small business, perhaps, making it possible for their children to get a college education. That’s one very common articulation of the American dream. Pride in our work turns to hubris when we believe that we are special for having worked, as if our work is somehow more ennobling than that of others, as if we have worked on a level playing field. When we fall into this kind of hubris individually, the consequences can be disastrous for us and maybe for those around us. When we fall into this kind of hubris as a nation, when we ignore the domination on which our dreams are based, the consequences are more dramatic. And when that nation is the wealthiest and most powerful in the world at a time in history when the high-energy, high-technology society is unraveling the fabric of the living world, the consequences are, in fact, life-threatening on a global scale.

When I say things like this, people often say, “Oh, don’t worry. Empires have come and gone. Hell, other species have come and gone. Nothing to worry about. The world carries on.” That’s all true, but it’s a disturbingly flippant response that glosses over two important considerations. Yes, it’s true, empires come and go, but let us not forget that empires cause immense suffering as they are built and immense suffering as they decline. And, second, the level of human intervention into the larger world has never been on this scale in terms of any other species. So the collapse of an empire in this context poses, I think, very new risks. To toss off these questions is, I think, to abandon one’s humanity.

To face all of this honestly, we need to recognize just how inadequate our existing ideas, projects, and institutions really are. Going back to Wes Jackson, the scientist I quoted earlier, he invoked a friend of his, the late geographer Dan Luten, when he said,

We, most Europeans, came as a poor people to a seemingly empty land that was rich in resources. We built our institutions with that perception of reality. Our political institutions, our educational institutions, our economic institutions, all built on that perception of reality. Yet in our time we have become rich people in an increasingly poor land that is filling up, and the institutions don’t hold.

Developing new institutions is never easy, but I think it will be easier if we can abandon our epic dreams and start dealing with the tragic nature of our circumstances.

To begin wrapping up, I want to concentrate a bit more on this notion of the epic. Let’s return to these words of the first American dreamer, our friend James Truslow Adams, who in his book, remember, said, “The epic loses all its glory without the dream.” Glory is about distinction, about claiming a special place. The American dream asserts such a place in history for the U.S., and from that vantage point U.S. domination seems justified. Yet the future, that is to say, if there is to be a future, depends on us being able to give up the illusion of being special and abandon the epic story of the United States.

I must say, it’s tempting for me to end there, with those of us who might critique the domination/subordination dynamic at the heart of American dream lecturing those American dreamers about how they must change. But I think we critics have dreams of our own to give up. We have our own epics of resistance, our own heroes who persevere against injustice in our counternarratives. Our rejection of the idea of the American dream seems to be absorbed into the dream itself, no matter how much we may object. How do we live in America and not dream? In other words, how do we persevere in a nightmare? Can we stay committed to radical politics without much hope for a happy ending? What if we were to succeed in our epic struggle to transcend the American dream but find that the American dream is just one small part of a larger tragedy of the modern human. What if the task is not simply to give up the dream of the United States as special but the dream of the human species as special? And what is the global forces set in motion during the high-energy, high- technology era are, in fact, beyond the point of no return?

Surrounded by big, majestic buildings and tiny, sophisticated electronic gadgets that were created through human cleverness, it’s easy for us to believe we are smart enough to run a complex world. But we should never forget that cleverness is not wisdom and the ability to create does not guarantee that we can control the destruction we have unleashed. It may be that no matter what the fate of the American dream, there is no way to rewrite this larger epic, that too much of the tragedy has already been played out.

But don’t worry, there’s good news. We’ll end with some good news. While tragic heroes need an unhappy fate, a community can learn from the protagonist’s fall. Even tragic heroes can, at the end, celebrate the dignity of the human spirit in their own failure. That may, in fact, be the task of Americans, to recognize that we can’t reverse course in time to prevent our ultimate failure but that in this time remaining we can recognize our own hamarthia, we can name our own hubris and excessive pride, we can do what we can do to undo the damage. That may be the one last chance for the United States to be truly heroic, for us to learn to leave the stage gracefully. Thank you.

Q&A

It’s a good point. You’re pointing out that people within these institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank, are not stupid. They have a whole lot of information at their disposal and they understand, maybe not presented in the same way I would, but understand much of what we’re talking about. So why don’t they change? I quoted James Wolfenson, a former president of the World Bank. But, remember, I said these were remarks he made as he was leaving. So when folks in those kinds of institutions tell the truth, it is, in fact, often when they are leaving. That reminds us that when they are in positions of power, they are serving the institutions. If they don’t serve the institutions, they wouldn’t be in those positions. Critical comments and deep self-reflection tend to come when their pensions are secure and they are moving on.

Which reminds us that it’s not the individuals, it’s the nature of the system. So what are institutions like the World Bank and the IMF set up to do? They’re set up not to engage us in critical self-reflection. They’re set up precisely to maintain the system as it exists, both the system that governs the distribution of wealth within the human family, that is, they’re created to keep the First World first, and they’re not set up to critique the system of domination of ecosystems through which that wealth is extracted. So it would be kind of unusual if people working in systems set up to perpetuate something would magically turn. For instance, I work at the University of Texas. It would be as if all of a sudden administrators started caring about education. Why would you expect that? They care about what they care about, which is money and football. Sometimes they throw a bone to those of us who teach. That’s the nature of these institutions. I think maybe deeper in your question is, the evidence is starting to pile up, especially about the health of the ecosphere. You don’t have to be a climate scientist, you don’t have to be an ecologist, you don’t even really have to know much beyond the headlines to know that we are facing a really serious set of crises, multiple crises. Here I think there is a psychological problem. And it’s not just of the leadership; it’s of all of us. We’re talking about the fact that the entire system in which we live—whether we’re rich or poor, the entire system in which we all live is fundamentally unsustainable. How do 7 billion people in the world start living differently? How do you start to imagine that? I don’t have a glib answer for that. The social dislocation and the calamities that are likely to come between today and whatever new organization of the human species we find I think kind of dwarf our moral imagination. And part of the reason we don’t engage it is because our moral imaginations don’t know how to.

It’s a very good point and something that needs to be taken quite seriously. To restate the question and comment, certainly many immigrants come to the U.S. coming from places where the minimal sort of material success that we might take for granted here is hard to achieve and having a chance to achieve that here. I don’t denigrate that. But I think that to leave that as the American dream and to leave that narrative of the dream uncritiqued is dangerous. The first part of it is, why are people coming to the U.S. to achieve the good life? Are Mexican immigrants, whether documented or not, coming because they hate Mexico, because Mexico is an inherently inferior place? No. They’re being driven to the U.S. because the economic conditions in a country like Mexico, very much conditioned on decisions made in Washington in New York, are driving them here. So coming to achieve the American dream is in part necessary because the American dream has destroyed the possibility of a Mexican dream. We’ve got to sort of keep that front and center.

Beyond that, whatever the case may be, people coming to achieve that kind of material success in the U.S. are adding to the long-term problem. Maybe as an analogy, imagine there is a train steaming forward and the dining car is well stocked, it’s nice and warm. Everybody wants to get on the train. I can’t blame you. You’re sitting by the side of the road, the train comes by, you want to get on. The problem is, the train is on a set of tracks that are heading to the cliff. Independent of how many people get on, that train is going over the cliff. That’s the other reality. And as long as these American-dream narratives are so deeply set in place, I think it’s harder to deal with these kinds of things honestly, both, again, the questions that revolve around social justice and the questions that revolve around ecological sustainability. I’m not arguing that we mock or denigrate those people who embrace it. I’m arguing that we engage in a conversation that tries to raise these critical questions.

To sort of encapsulate, we’re seeing large numbers of people in the U.S. who were raised with the expectation that the material part of the dream especially would be available. The story is often told that every generation believed that their children were going to have more and easier access to more than they had had. All of a sudden that is no longer the case. So what happens? As you say, what happens is rather predictable. In a culture with no consistent left organizations, ideology, and traditions, that anger and resentment at elites who have created a system that no longer serves the needs of ordinary people are not likely to be directed into a deep left critique of capitalism and empire. If the institutions aren’t there, the ideology isn’t there, why would one expect people to automatically move to what we believe to be the correct left interpretation? Where will they go? They’ll go to the place where the ideology is well developed and the institutions exist and are well funded, which is a right-wing critique.

That in some ways is very depressing. But I think we also have to ask the question, how long can that continue? How long can relatively elite right-wing forces sell to a population that they should get to be more right-wing to solve their problems, when it is, in fact, the right-wing ideology that is the basis for the problems? How long that can continue? Well, in a well-developed propaganda system, that we have in the U.S.—propaganda meaning educational institutions, media institutions, and often the church—that can go on for quite some time. What scares me is that even if eventually we imagine that we can turn the tide, how long do we have to really make serious inroads?

I think what this brings up is the question of fascism. Throughout most of my time of being politically active, I’ve listened to people, usually younger people, angry for justifiable reasons, describe the U.S. as a fascist society. You know what I’m talking about. “The U.S. is a fascist state, man. The U.S. is a police state, man.” Guess what? It’s not. The U.S. is not a fascist state and it’s not a police state. If you have doubts, call my friend from Turkey who used to be a left labor organizer in Turkey when it really was a fascist police state. I digress. She said this at a meeting we had once. Some guy got up and started railing on about the U.S. being a police state. And she said, “Excuse me, sir. I’ve lived in a police state. This isn’t one.” It doesn’t mean that the police power of the country isn’t used to target specific people. Of course it is. That’s why the jails are disproportionately black and brown. But we are not a fascist state, not in any way in which fascism is a meaningful term in political science.

I would argue over and over again, we live in a liberal, pluralist, capitalist democracy which is very good at social control. But that form of social control is very different from fascism. It doesn’t mean it’s a good situation. It means it’s different. And when you conflate the two, I think you lose analytic power and therefore you lose any hopes of making inroads in the population.

All that said, I’m worried about the United States turning fascist. I don’t think it is, but I think that that possibility is not inconceivable. I think we do have to think about that. That means that our organizing has to constantly—even though I said I don’t think this is a mass-movement moment, I think that we do have to start wherever we can connecting to people.

The question—this is a good place to conclude, I think, because it’s so central—how can we diminish the influence of money, which means the influence of concentrated wealth, on politics? You often hear that a Supreme Court decision or a law affects corporate and union contributions, which assumes that these are equivalent, which, of course, they’re not. What we’re talking about is concentrated wealth and the way it undermines democracy. Concentrated wealth leads to a disruption of the democratic potential of a society. That’s quite clear. This is one of those subjects that I think leads to a really healthy conversation about the fundamental nature of the economic system. The problem is not that we have this great capitalist economy and it’s been hijacked somehow. You often here this “hijacked” narrative. This system was always designed to concentrate wealth and therefore concentrate power. The form in which it does it shifts as movements try to resist and then they’re beaten back. But the problem is the nature of the capitalist economic system and the predominant form within which that economic activity goes forward—the corporation.

The particular craziness of it right now, on which there’s a lot of attention, is the legal decisions that have led over the past century or so to the American legal system treating corporations as if they were persons in various matters, including matters of freedom of expression. Well, every time I’ve ever asked an audience, whether it’s a class or a public audience, whether they think corporations are in any meaningful sense persons, everybody laughs. No, that’s crazy. We’re persons, we’re people. Those corporations, whether they’re the corporations we work for or the ones we’ve had to buy goods from, those aren’t people in any meaningful sense. They’re soulless, they’re amoral by definition. So trying to latch on to that I think is important. Not because the corporation itself is the problem but because the corporation in a capitalist economy is the problem. And by entering into the discussion about the nature of corporate persons, we can lead to a larger and more fruitful discussion of the underlying basis of the economy and the way it does and always will undermine democracy.

This is a practical rhetorical thing. I always say, we have political equality in the U.S., correct? One person, one vote. Free expression, freedom of association, correct? Right? Absolutely right. That means that Bill Gates and I are political equals. That’s true. Because when Bill Gates goes into the voting booth, how many times does he pull the lever? Once. I go in, I pull it once. I have freedom of speech, Bill Gates has freedom of speech. If I want to start a new political party, is anybody going to stop me? No. If Bill Gates wants to, is anybody going to stop him? No. Bill Gates and I are political equals, correct?

You put it that way and everybody is snickering, and then at some point they break into laughter. Because it’s a ludicrous proposition that Bill Gates and I are political equals. Because everyone understands that Bill Gates has at his disposal financial resources that dwarf that not only of me but everybody in this room, our extended families, and everybody we’ve ever known in our lives. And therefore, that concentrated wealth is going to affect the distribution of power.

You cannot have a democracy based on the idea of political power that is distributed in an economic system in which wealth is concentrated. That doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics or political science. That just takes common sense. And the more times we can stand up in front of people or sit down with people at dinner and make these basic points and then open up discussion on what it will take to really create a democratic culture on the idea that it’s only a truly democratic culture that’s going to make it possible to work for social justice and ecological sustainability, then at least we have the hope of moving forward.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org
©2011

by Arun Gupta,
speech delivered at the Red Emma’s Bookstore,
Baltimore, MD,
15 April 2011
available from Alternative Radio

Arun Gupta, journalist and activist, was founding editor of The Indypendent newspaper in New York. He’s a regular contributor to Alternet and Z. He also appears on Democracy Now, GRIT TV, and Al Jazeera.

What I want to do is to kind of historicize the Tea Party. They cannot just be understood as a recent phenomenon. One of the things that I’ve learned, both in terms of studying the right and interacting with people who consider themselves Tea Party activists, is the right generally hates history. They hate facts, they hate any sort of historical or social context. That’s why they constantly refer to the Constitution and the Bible as all sources of legitimacy. And, of course, for much of the right the Constitution is seen almost as a biblical or actually as a biblical document. There’s an extreme disdain often for history, and there is a tremendous amount of fabrication that exists on the right.

So even the process of trying to historicize the Tea Party is important for us to understand. And it’s important to understand that this is something that the right is not really interested in and it’s something that we need to figure out how to address. How do you deal with a force that fundamentally denies reality?

Any starting point is, of course, ultimately arbitrary. I choose a starting point of the economic and political crisis of the 1970s. That’s what gave birth to the doctrine known as neoliberalism that came to fruition by the end of the decade with Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Reagan in the U.S. Neoliberalism is, of course, a doctrine of privatization, privatizing government services; trade and capital liberalization, that we should liberalize capital’s ability to move about; deregulation, the doctrine of personal responsibility; and flexibility, especially in regard to labor.

So what happened in the 1970s? Just very quickly. Capital fled to low-wage regions around the world. The U.S. manufacturing work force peaked at around 39 million in 1979, just to put that in perspective. Today it’s maybe around 12 million, and, of course, the population is significantly larger. So this is a drop of somewhere around 70% to 75% in the manufacturing work force. It fled to low-wage regions that also had few regulations on labor, environment, and movement of profits. Domestically, private-sector unionism found itself under fierce assault so capital could increase the use of part-time, temporary, and free-lance workers. Union and environmental and safety regulations were also seen as limits on production, so those were smashed so labor flexibility could be increased. A lot of us, I imagine almost everyone in this room, has dealt with it at one point or another, where you find yourself in temporary work, part-time work, contract work. The idea is that you can be added or shed very quickly by capital.

One of the things that was remarkable about the depression —I don’t call it a recession— that began in 2008 was the massive rate at which capital just shed jobs. It was shedding jobs at over a half a million a month. And that doesn’t include all the people who were involuntarily unemployed. At this point, even though we hear the talk in the corporate media that we’re in recovery, the real unemployment rate, what’s known as the U6 rate—the Labor Department tracks this; you can find it on their Web site—it includes unemployed, those who have stopped looking for jobs but want to be employed, the underemployed—is about 16%. Except what the Labor Department doesn’t track, it doesn’t track people who have involuntarily taken retirements. In other words, people might have a small pension they could live on, some savings, who are hoping to bridge it to Social Security. And they don’t include in this rate youth, who have been unable to enter the work force. There is also a shadow economy. So we’re probably dealing with a real unemployment rate approaching 20%. If we go back to the Great Depression, it was 25% to 30%. This is persistent; this is called the new reality. So I think it’s fair to say this is not a recession or the term that The New York Times has popularized, “the Great Recession.” It really is a depression, especially on the order of the 19th century depressions.

Neoliberalism, of course, means new liberalism in terms of reference to the 19th century laissez-faire- capitalist doctrine. The reason we moved away from laissez-faire capitalism was you would have these devastating boom-and-bust cycles, where you would have the economy expand, overproduction, and then depression after depression after depression. There were these panics and huge depressions in the latter half of the 19th century. Capitalism actually wanted regulation, it wanted central banking, it wanted the government to intervene, because it was in its economic interest to stabilize the economy. Yet we are kind of moving back to this era. And the Tea Party does play a particularly critical role in terms of pushing a revival of 19th century laissez-faire economics.

Capital now has this ability to literally move around the world at the speed of light. Capital in a lot of ways has become decentered. You can’t even talk about a New York Stock Exchange anymore, for instance. It takes investigative reporters to find out where the New York Stock Exchange is located, because it’s now in computer- server farms that might be in Illinois, they might be in Virginia, they might be in Iowa. It’s even hard to find out where the trading is actually going on. There have also been all these shadow markets that have grown up over the last 20 years. So capitalism just kind of endlessly, ceaselessly circles the globe looking for profit.

There are three basic forms of capitalism: financial capitalism, industrial capitalism, and merchant capitalism. Even industrial capitalism has an ability to move from one region to another. Of course, it needs things like ports, roads, electricity, infrastructure. But given how capital has leveled much of the world in terms of wages, in terms of regulation, it can now move from region to region to region. For instance, NAFTA was sold to Mexico as this is going to bring employment. Yes, there was a certain amount of employment that was brought to the low-wage, unregulated maquiladoras in northern Mexico. But at the same time, Mexico has been consistently losing employment in the maquiladoras over the last few years because capital can go to Central America, it can go to the Caribbean, it can go to Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, China. It can just keep going around and around and around, because governments keep building these wage zones where they try to compete for various types of industrial capital and manufacturing capital to come in. So there is this process of where it can just keep moving around.

What this does, of course, is it pushes down wages and benefits, because it seeks comparative advantage wherever it can get it. It goes to one region, and then another government might try to entice it. We have even lower wages, we have even fewer benefits, we have less regulation on the environment, we’ll give you more tax breaks, we have a more modern infrastructure, and on and on and on. This creates what’s commonly called the race to the bottom. I think certainly in this country we’re especially seeing that. There has been a big debate over whether we are really in a race to the bottom, because wages have sustained themselves somewhat. But I think really in the last couple years we are seeing another step in terms of that race to the bottom, with lower wages, fewer benefits. The average household income is declining, average wages are declining, benefits are under severe attack.

One of the results of the financialization is a series of asset bubbles, one right after the other. The savings and loan crisis, the Internet bubble in the 1990s. What happened after the Internet bubble was the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to historic lows. And this fed the next bubble, which was the mortgage bubble. By cutting interest rates to historic lows, it encouraged a lot of refinancing, a lot of home building, and some home ownership. But especially, what it really encouraged, when interest rates were around 1%—they are even lower today—was it encouraged a lot of profiteering in debt-related securitization. So this is where you have the wizards of Wall Street starting to bundle credit-card debt, car-loan debt, student-loan debt, and most of all, mortgage debt, particularly commercial mortgages and residential mortgages. They take thousands of loans, they bundle them, and then they sell off parts of this to investors.

What this did is it created this enormous appetite for more and more and more debt. So we had the debt-driven economy. You also had the huge growth in derivatives during this era. This is stuff like swaps, where you’re taking a bet on whether a bond is going to fail or not. You have all sorts of derivatives: futures, options, a huge explosion in currency trading and commodity trading. But it’s really the mortgage-driven speculation that starts to drive the economy. By the height of the bubble, in 2005 and 2006, we’re hearing, “Oh, the economy is expanding, it’s growing. There is this huge wealth being made.” Almost 50% of new jobs were coming from the home- building industry and from mortgage securitization. So you had huge growth in terms of realtors, in terms of people who work these boiler-room operations and are calling you 20 times a week trying to get you to refinance your mortgage, the construction industry, of course, the appliances, places like Home Depot, etc. This is really where the growth is coming from.

One of the important aspects to remember about this is a lot of what Wall Street is doing is what’s called fictitious capital. In other words, they’re creating this capital that isn’t based on any actual production. But the thing is, though, when you look at it, it actually does have an effect on the productive sphere. And I’ll talk about this a little more later.

We’re now in two different bubbles right now. We’re well into a bubble in terms of commodities and precious metals. Over the last decade, gold has gone from about $250 an ounce to nearly $1500 an ounce. Gold is a meaningless asset in a lot of ways; there is no reason why it should be $1500 an ounce. But it could easily go to $5,000 an ounce, is what some people are speculating. The other bubble we’re in is a commodities bubble, especially agricultural commodities, oil, land, industrial metals. But this can’t absorb a lot of capital.

In terms of the crisis that we had in 2008-2009, what happens during a crisis, you wind up with surplus labor and surplus capital. And, of course, we see the surplus labor in this country in the 25 to 30 million unemployed and underemployed. But you also have a surplus capital problem, because the wealthy sit on an enormous amount of wealth. They usually have it in pretty safe assets. So right now what’s known as ultra-high-net-worth Americans, or high-net-worth Americans, these are Americans who have $1 million in investable assets. This is completely exclusive of their homes. These are people who have a huge amount of liquid assets. They’re sitting on $12 trillion of wealth. Whereas corporations are running record profits. The last quarter they were running an annual rate of corporate profits of $1.66 trillion a year. They’re sitting on enormous cash reserves.

So there is a problem. What do you do with all this money? You can’t just let it sit around or it will be destroyed. It will be destroyed by inflation or it will be devalued over time. You always have to look for some sort of place to be able to invest it. The commodities bubble is one. There is an absolutely enormous amount of money going into the emerging markets because there’s no place else to put it. So there are huge flows of capital going into China, into India, Brazil, Russia, various African nations. We can see how it’s reshaping the world. Even though you have a lot of fictitious wealth being created, it then has an effect on the real world in terms of actually shaping it. What’s going on in China is phenomenal in terms of human history—the urbanization, the fact that it’s literally been able to put up cities of 10 million, 20 million people in just a decade or two. At one point something like half the construction cranes in the world were in Shanghai. It’s really unprecedented in human history what is going on in China.

The problem is, though, with each asset bubble, you get a greater and greater crash. So the amount of wealth that was wiped out during the Internet bubble that popped in 2000 was about $10 trillion. The amount of wealth that was wiped out in the financial assets bubble, the mortgage bubble in 2008 was about $50 trillion. To put that in perspective, that’s the annual output of the entire global economy. So the thing is, if an emerging-market bubble eventually inflates and then is destroyed, there is absolutely no mechanism to deal with it on a global scale. So we are really setting ourselves up for the mother of all economic crises, whether that’s 5, 10, or 20 years down the road.

I was talking a little bit about surplus labor, the amount of unemployment. One thing to note is what’s known as the capacity utilization rate. That’s basically how much of factories and the manufacturing sphere is being used. Nearly three years after the crisis hit the bottom in late 2008, we are still below the capacity utilization rate of the 1990-to-1991 recession. What this means effectively is there is a large surplus capacity. This is a real problem for capitalism. If you already have a large surplus capacity, if you can already create all sorts of cars, all sorts of steel, all sorts of semiconductors, consumer electronic goods and nobody is buying them, then who wants to invest in new factories? Even though there’s all this talk from the right, Obama, the Democrats, we need new tax investments, we need new investment in business, when you already have this huge overcapacity, what’s the point? Businesses aren’t going to invest. They have no need to invest. A lot of this overcapacity has to be destroyed.

Historically, a lot of the way it gets destroyed is through warfare. That plays a critical role, of course, in the cycles of capitalism, the way the warfare state and actual large-scale military conflicts help to renew the capitalist system. We in this country keep relying on that. I think it would be interesting to actually do an investigation into how much of the manufacturing work force is directly employed in military industries. Or take the Bush wars. During the era of the Bush wars, there was often this slogan on the left, “We’re losing all this blood and treasure.” After a while I started to become really uncomfortable with that notion of losing treasure, because when you start to look at the supplemental appropriations, where the U.S. government was spending an extra $100 billion, $200 billion a year or more, if you were looking where it was actually going, it was actually going into all this production. It was going into factories in Ohio to make new Humvees, it was going to factories in Texas to make new Black Hawk helicopters, it was going to the huge defense industry in southern California to make missiles, to repair fighter planes. So in many ways this was an actual jobs program that was going on during the Bush administration. Of course, it’s the most destructive and inefficient jobs program imaginable. But the notion that these wars are just an entire waste, we shouldn’t view that as entirely true. They actually serve a productive role. They also, of course, serve a great ideological role because of the number of people who are employed either as soldiers or as mercenaries or as private contractors. You create this huge base of support across the country for continuing these wars because people’s livelihoods are directly related to it.

The whole point of the economic crisis in terms of how it was dealt with has been an attack on the public sector, on unions, on social welfare. When the bubble started to burst in 2008, the stance of the Federal Reserve, the government, the economic elite was, We just need to solve the problem. We need to keep the banking and commercial system whole. And, sure, there is a certain truth to that. If you see that the banking system is kind of the heart for capitalism, you have to keep it going. But, of course, when it came time to figure out who’s going to pay, again, we know how that story went.

But it’s, first of all, important to think about what just went on in the last decade. First the banks and the wealthy make these huge profits off basically an economy that’s a giant pyramid scheme. You constantly have more money coming in, and the profits keep flowing up. But eventually you run out of suckers. What happened was, by 2006- 2007 you ran out of people who were going to take mortgages because basically everyone who could take a mortgage had taken a mortgage. So it starts to collapse. The people on the bottom are left holding the bag. Over the last five or six years, we’ve actually seen the greatest destruction of African American wealth in American history. It’s been absolutely devastating what’s happened to the African American community. And it’s gotten very little attention. Huge parts of urban, middle-class neighborhoods across the country, especially on the East Coast and in the Midwest, have just been utterly clear-cut of African Americans because many were pressured, tricked, or enticed into taking these risky ARMs, the adjustable-rate mortgages, where you get this teaser rate and then it explodes after a year or two. And, of course, in the way that Wall Street works, this money flows upward.

The bubble burst. We, of course, first had to pay with the huge bailouts, of which TARP, Troubled Asset Relief Program, was just the smallest. It depends on how you count it. TARP, was passed by the Bush administration. And here’s a good example. Something like 35% or 40% of Republicans think that TARP was opposed by the Republican Party. There was a segment of the Republican Party that did oppose it, but this was the Bush administration that passed it. Of course, Obama was 100% behind it while McCain waffled. Nonetheless, it was the Republicans who passed it initially.

There are all sorts of various accounts of how much the government has directly and indirectly subsidized the financial sector. The person who has done the best work on this is a financial analyst named Nomi Prins. She used to be a managing director at Goldman Sachs. You can find her work in Mother Jones, where she details something like over 70 different programs put in place by the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the Treasury Department. I think, according to the last time I looked, it’s something like $23 trillion. A lot of that is just loan guarantees, it’s back- stopping credit. So direct subsidies, it’s a little harder to say, but it is in the trillions of dollars that directly went into Wall Street.

I don’t know if anybody saw the rather ridiculous—the story itself wasn’t ridiculous in The New York Times; it was a pretty good report—about how there have been zero cases brought against any of this financial fraud. Of course, this all depended on massive financial fraud. What Lehman Brothers did, what Bear Stearns did, what all these banks did, what was happening in the mortgage industry, huge financial fraud. And not one person has been brought to account yet. There were regulators apparently telling prosecutors, “Well, don’t go after them,” because they didn’t want to have the sight of banks paying fines with government money, is one reason that prosecutors were told not to go after the banking industry. But overall the whole approach of the government has been to let them go scot-free in terms of what happened.

The first thing was to make the public directly pay, which was to pay back shareholders and bondholders to make them whole. In one case, when AIG collapsed, they’re the ones who had backed a huge amount of swaps.

I’ll explain swaps real quickly, because it’s a good thing to understand. Say you’re General Motors and you’re floating corporate bonds all the time to back payroll, to back manufacturing, to build new factories. Say you issue a $10 million bond. GM decides, Well, we want to take insurance on this in case we end up defaulting on it. So they go to a company like AIG, they take insurance. Maybe they have to pay 1% or 2%, so they have to pay $100,000 or $200,000. And if they default, then AIG makes the bondholders whole. That’s the role it plays.

What started to happen during this just tremendous speculative boom that went on in the last decade, when people were taking swaps that the companies didn’t even know about, there started to be a huge market trading in the swaps, such that no one knew who held the insurance on these bonds until you started to actually start to have bets on the swaps: you started to have a derivative of a derivative. A derivative just means you’re deriving something from an underlying asset. Where you’re saying you’re betting on the future price of corn, that’s a derivative. The swaps are also derivatives. You’re making a bet on the underlying asset, the bond. But then you started to have second- and third-order derivatives, and you started to have these secretive and shadow markets.

So when AIG started to collapse, the Treasury Department came in. Normally what you would do in this case is you would have the companies “take a haircut.” That’s the jargon of the industry. In other words, that they should only get paid a dime on the dollar, 20 cents on the dollar, 30 cents on the dollar. Even in the markets that were pricing these swaps, though they varied, they were only something like 20 to 50 cents on the dollar, even sometimes less, depending on what the swap was. The Treasury Department decides to make them entirely whole; in other words, they pay back 100 cents on the dollar, even though the markets were valuing them at far less. And, of course, this is kind of the role of government, is to transfer wealth upwards, or at least what the role of government has become. So that’s the first way: Make the public pay.

The second way is through the debt. So you transferred all this money to the wealthy. The government needs to pay for it somehow, so it floats bonds. But who is going to buy bonds? The rich buy the bonds. So now you’ve given them money a second way, because you pay an interest rate on the bonds, so the rich and corporations and large institutions are profiting a second way.

The third thing that happens is we’re told, oh, now we all have to share in the pain. Of course, we’re all sharing the pain of the super-rich while they’re making record profits, they’re enjoying record wealth. So social services start to be decimated. This process, of course, goes back, again, to the Reagan-Thatcher era, but now we’re seeing a new round. And the Republicans have come out with another new attack, that they completely want to destroy Medicare and Medicaid.

But the way we should understand the attack on social services, one, it’s to discipline labor. Two, it’s to put the costs of social reproduction back on the work force. In other words, you get a wage. You are entirely responsible for your housing, for your food, for your education, for your health care, for your retirement, for your transportation, and on and on and on. If you don’t get enough, well, that’s your problem, because you’re too lazy, you didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t take advantage of the opportunities given to you. So this becomes a method to discipline labor.

What also happens is because of this, because the costs of social reproduction start to come down, not for the workers but for the government, and because capital is able to make people more desperate, more contingent, it leads to a cut in wages and benefits. When you have such high unemployment and underemployment, you can cut wages and benefits further, which results in greater corporate profits. So the rich benefit a third way.

And, of course, they benefit a fourth way through the lowering of corporate taxes. Obama ran on basically one pledge. His signature pledge was he was going to repeal the Bush-era tax cuts. And yet he renewed them. And we’re seeing the same thing where I live in New York State, where Andrew Cuomo backed a repeal of a millionaires’ tax. Even though something like $1.5 billion is being cut from education and health care, they’re still repealing the millionaires’ tax so millionaires can get more money. Of course, they don’t even really use the justification, Oh, it creates jobs anymore, because how can you say that when you have 25 to 30 million unemployed and underemployed?

So in all these different ways the rich benefit. But there are still other reasons why there is this attack on social services and the public sector. And this is where we start to really get into an understanding of the Tea Party. The role the public sector plays, of course, is they are the ones who are carrying out these public services. It’s the teachers who are carrying out the public education. It’s the social workers, the doctors, nurses, medical personnel who work in the public hospital, all the various administrators and personnel who work in the public services. So it’s kind of this two-part effort: you want to cut the social services as much as possible, and you want to cut the work force as much as possible, a two-prong attack.

But there is also a very important role, again, that we need to be aware of. It’s to destroy what we can call the infrastructure of dissent—to basically deny people the capacity to have mass resources to oppose what’s going on. And unions. Unions are, I think, in how they operate are highly problematic. The American labor movement basically serves its role as a junior partner to capital and keeps begging capital, Please, can’t we work with you, even as capital keeps trying to destroy it. But nonetheless it has a potential to organize a lot of people in terms of massive dissent.

For instance, during the last two election cycles, nobody knows the exact number but it’s estimated that the labor movement—and this is the big unions, like the AFL- CIO or SEIU or AFSCME, which is the public-sector unions—poured over half a billion dollars into the Democratic Party. There is just simply no force on the left that has that amount of money. The amount of money available to unions is huge, because even though the percentage of the work force that’s unionized is something like 8%, that still means over 10 million workers are paying dues to unions. The amount of assets that they theoretically have at their disposal is something in the range of $10 billion. Though to put that in perspective, you could take any two banks on Wall Street and they paid more in bonuses in 2008—just in bonuses—than all union assets combined. So in one way it’s a huge amount of money, but in another way it’s not a huge amount of money.

Let me quickly run through these other points, which I think are important. I think one of the most overlooked aspects of what’s going on in terms of the economic crisis—and, again, this relates directly to the Tea Party movement—is gender relations. At least in the initial phases of this economic crisis, 80% of the job losses were accounted for by men. Men were losing the jobs, women were losing wages and benefits. Because women were generally often concentrated in the contingent work force already, they were already temporary, they were already part-time, they weren’t seeing greater job losses so much as they were seeing their wages cut or their benefits cut further.

This has had a significant effect. For example, for the first time in U.S. history, or at least modern U.S. history, there are now more unmarried Americans from age 18 to 34 than there are married Americans. These are the prime child-bearing years. There is a simple reason for a lot of this. Women are an increasing percentage, a majority of the college-age population, and they’re growing. They’re also growing rapidly in all sorts of professional fields. In terms of gender relations I’ve found one thing curious. You find this absolutely vicious attack by the right on reproductive rights that’s going on, but it’s seen as somehow separate from the economic crisis. And I actually think that they’re intimately intertwined, because essentially men’s identity is seen as under attack. They’re no longer the breadwinners. The minority in this country is becoming a majority at a rapid pace. So these vicious attacks on reproductive rights, even trying to redefine rape, which Republicans have been doing at the state level, is a way to reconstruct male identity and male power. We have to be aware of how these different influences play out.

Similarly, we see the reconstruction of the national identity in terms of the anti-immigration movement, the Islamophobia movements. It’s a way to give people a sense of social power. The Tea Party is an extremely white movement. By various counts it’s 94% to 98% white. And in my anecdotal experience, it is extremely white. So by having these vicious anti-immigration movements, you give people a sense that they have an identity, they have some sort of social power. Maybe their job prospects are declining or ending, maybe they’re not wanted as a mate by someone, they’re lonely, but being able to act out their aggression against someone else gives them a sense of belonging in the public sphere.

I think we have to understand how these things are intimately linked, because this gets to the heart of what the Tea Party movement is about and how we need to learn why they have had so much success. I’m going to talk about the Tea Party in five interlocking frames: historical, social, political, ideological, and psychological.

First historical. The Tea Party is a classic reactionary movement. That goes back to the French Revolution. I recently read Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution, a terrific book. I was struck by how in a lot of ways we’re still fighting the French Revolution, except the right is winning and the left has disappeared or surrendered. Because what the right, especially the reactionary right, is still about is it opposes progress and it idealizes a society based on tradition and hierarchy. So the early reactionaries in the 19th century defended the church, the king, the aristocracy, and property. Reactionaries today defend property, the market, Christianity, whiteness, American exceptionalism, and privileges based on race, gender, nationality, and often heterosexuality.

We can also historicize the Tea Party movement in terms of the modern American right. We have to understand that there are these upsurges again and again and again. There was the right around the Goldwater campaign in 1964. Then, of course, with George Wallace, this very racist, white-supremacist right in the mid-1960s that Nixon was able to peel off a lot of into his Silent Majority. His was kind of a kinder, gentler racist right, where they used the term “benign neglect,” that they weren’t going to be overtly racist, but they would just kind of neglect the minority communities that were repressed. Of course, we had the Reagan revolution and the Christian right, which was very much about enforcing these traditional normative and largely imagined ideas of how family and the society should operate. There was a 1990s Republican revolution led by Newt Gingrich. And, of course, the growth of the militia movements. And now we’ve had the Tea Party movement.

We need to understand that in each of these phases often the Democrats are enabling and creating the political space for the next phase of the right. Clinton did that with the Republican revolution in 1994. Carter certainly played that role in terms of creating the ground that Reaganism was able to successfully occupy. And Obama certainly did that. He made the Tea Party real through the bailouts, while they were bailing out the wealthy and abandoning the rest of the society and not offering an alternative vision. But, of course, we need to recognize that labor and the liberals also abandoned all opposition to the class- warfare agenda of Democrats and Obama, while the left is virtually nonexistent, at least as a national force. So the right had a huge opening to take advantage. I think a lot of times when people hear “class warfare,” they’re, like, “That’s just rhetoric.” But I would remind them that just a few years ago Warren Buffet said, “There’s class warfare going on in this country. It’s my class that’s fighting it, and it’s my class that’s winning it.” So when you have the richest man in America saying that his class is engaging and winning class warfare, I think we can all agree that that’s part of the fundamental reality.

The social aspects of the Tea Party. If you look at the polling data—and this is what I found confirmed through my anecdotal evidence in terms of going to Tea Party meetings—it is overwhelming white, as I said, up to 98% white, if not more. It trends male. It’s slightly above average income, mostly Republican, 60-70% or more. Much older, many retirees. And they tend to be, but are not always, entrepreneurial and Christian. The Tea Party, though, is, at least in terms of the right, a very diverse movement. So in some areas you might find the Christian right predominates, in some areas you might find the libertarian right predominates, in some areas, especially, say, out in the West, it’s more kind of this rugged individualism ethos. So you have to look at particular regions in terms of who identifies as the Tea Party. These are people who are doing pretty decently, they’re often entrepreneurial, but they see themselves as under attack both socially and economically. This has a couple of important aspects I’ll talk about in terms of how they view economic relations.

But ultimately what it is also, it’s a very dangerous cry of an older white America that’s fading away as the country does become truly multi-ethnic, particularly Latino. It’s very exclusionist, nativist, racist, often violently so. The Tea Party movement has huge overlaps with the anti-immigrant movement, with the Islamophobia movements. So it is very much a reactionary movement in its defense of this ideal of a white middle class nuclear family where children obeyed authority, blacks were submissive, women were limited to strict gender and social roles, immigrants assimilated or unknown, and the white, wage-earning, patriarchal male was the ruler of the home and the middle-class neighborhood.

The political aspect. Another way to understand the modern right, the reactionary right, and the Tea Party is, simply put, that it’s against the downward redistribution of wealth and power and for enforcing order and discipline in the social sphere of politics and the economy. It’s really remarkable when you look at all the groups that the right attacks. It’s unions, it’s women, it’s lesbians and gays, it’s immigrants, Latinos, blacks, Muslims. It just goes on and on and on, all the different groups they attack. One, there is a commonality in terms of they oppose any sort of redistribution of power and wealth. But, two, they have this amazing ability to just keep constantly circulating who the particular scapegoat of the moment is. The left and liberals are always trying to play catch-up. One day it’s welfare mothers, the next day it’s feminists, another day it’s bureaucrats, then it’s the unions. We have to understand how they have such adaptability. Of course, I’m not talking about the large natural advantages the Tea Party has in having huge resources behind it, in having an enormous national platform through Fox News and the huge right-wing echo chamber. Nonetheless, there is kind of a coherent ideology there. It’s a scary ideology, but there is a coherent one we need to be aware of.

Another way to understand the political ideology of the Tea Party—and this is very important—they are very racist, they are very reactionary, but they have what can be called a chauvinistic universalism. It’s wrapped up in a single saying that they love to use again and again, which is, “Equality of opportunity does not guarantee equality of outcome.” It’s this belief in the meritocracy, that everybody has an equal opportunity. Of course, this doesn’t account for historical oppressions, this doesn’t account for slavery and the American apartheid that existed well into the 1960s, it doesn’t account for the social, economic, political repression of women, etc. So that’s the chauvinistic aspect. But they are trying to frame something as universal, and a lot of people do find it appealing. And I have seen some people of color within the Tea Party movement who are fully behind this. Yes, everyone has equality of opportunity; that doesn’t mean that equal outcomes are guaranteed.

The fourth aspect, ideological. These can just be summed up in simple concepts. Libertarianism. As I mentioned early, the Tea Party is very much about a libertarian ideology. In other words, completely get the government out of the way, let the free market rule absolutely—no regulation, no limits. That’s because they see the market as the guarantor of freedom and liberty. And, of course, hey, we can try that, but we’ve been there and done that. That’s what led to the robber baron era, that’s what Dickensian England was like. Just huge disparities between wealth and poverty, which we’re seeing again.

Another way to encapsulate their ideology is social Darwinism, in other words, that somehow the market society naturally selects. If you’re poor, then you are not as evolved: you’ve lost the natural selection of the market. They also have what could be called a neo-Malthusian ideology. Everyone is kind of familiar with Malthus, and they think it has to do with natural limits, in other words, that population growth outstrips food supply. That wasn’t what Malthus’s essays on population were actually about. He was arguing against aid to the poor. And that’s very much what the Tea Party is about, that there should be no more aid to the poor because you encourage indolence, you encourage sloth. So Malthus was saying we need to stop giving aid to the poor because we just encourage them to procreate and create ever more poor, so you’re going to have more poor you need to support. You see kind of that neo-Malthusian ideology present within the Tea Party.

One of the most important aspects is the psychological aspect. I think this is particularly where we need to pay attention, because the left does a very poor job of dealing with psychology. Generally, the left is very economistic: it wants to reduce everything to economic relations—it’s accrued materialism, nondialectical. In other words, we don’t see the dialectic between material relations, which, of course, are fundamentally important, and ideas. One of the things we need to pay attention to is, of course, what’s going on in the Arab spring. This shows the power of ideas, the way it’s just spread from one country to the next. People, I would argue, are fundamentally motivated by ideas. It’s ideas, it’s hope that give them the ability to change the world, to imagine new forms of social relations. We saw that briefly in Wisconsin. So we have to understand the dialectical relationship.

The left also tends to focus on what can be called biological reductionism, that the type of issues we fight for have to do with our social reproduction. So we fight for better housing, for access to food, for health care, for education, for clean water. All very important, but that’s not the sum of it. What is the good life? We don’t even ask ourselves that anymore on the left, What is the good life? What type of lives? Why do we want everyone to be able to have a minimum standard, a decent life, to be able to have housing, to be able to have proper health care? There still has to be a greater good beyond that. And we need to talk about that.

In terms of the Tea Party, the psychology of it, just look at the name, the Tea Party. It’s, of course, referencing the Boston Tea Party. It’s for a national refounding. This is, as I said, the funny thing. They absolutely venerate the Constitution. They think the Constitution is some sort of holy document. In that kind of famous video that Sarah Palin did after Gabrielle Giffords was shot, the one she released from her cave in Alaska, she referred to the Constitution as “a sacred document.” So they really see the Constitution as kind of the complete foundation of our society. And what they’re trying to do by this refounding is they want to address personal and national impotence through a return to traditional values and hence a return to power.

There is a desire on their part to restore order across the various spheres of society. They want people to be disciplined, that we should value sacrifice. This is why we need to cut services: we have to live within our means. That there is a virtue to being able to live within your means, that you pay your bill on time, that you are able to pay your mortgage, that, if necessary, you all kind of join together and share. It’s this very idealized notion. To the last generation, the next generation is always lazy. Kids are always lazy. They don’t know the value of hard work.

You see this a lot in the anti-immigration debate. Immigrants are fundamentally woven throughout our society, and a lot of it is because they will do the jobs that other Americans don’t want to do. Who is going to work in the fast-food restaurants? Who is going to harvest the fields, pick the fruits from the orchard, do domestic labor, do a lot of the very hard menial labor in industries, etc.? Well, the anti-immigrant right is, like, Americans will do it, even though, if we were somehow able to magically get rid of all undocumented immigrants, our economy would probably be on the brink of collapse within a week. But their attitude is, Kids today need to learn the value of hard work. They need to do this. I did this when I was young. These ideas have great appeal.

We have to understand that the Tea Party isn’t just a fabrication. There is often this notion that the Tea Party—because they have so much wealth behind them, because the Koch brothers, who are worth nearly $100 billion, are pouring so much in the Tea Party groups, because of Fox News, because of the Republican Party—is just an astroturf group, in other words, completely fake. That’s not entirely true. There are astroturf elements, but they have a perspective that speaks to tens of millions of Americans. As I said, it’s scary, its repressive, it’s a fantasy, and it’s based on a fundamental rejection of reality. For instance, most Republicans don’t even think global warming is real, which, of course, is absolutely absurd, when every single bit of data shows more and more and more that we are destabilizing the entire biosphere and the climate. Yet they don’t think it’s real. There is this fundamental rejection of reality. But still, they have a clear ideology and they explain social relations in a way that appeals to tens of millions of Americans.

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact:
David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org
www.alternativeradio.org
©2011

by the late Howard Zinn,
speech delivered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, 21 March 1991
[just after “Operation Desert Storm,” also known as the “First Gulf War,” even though there had been a previous “Gulf War” between Iraq and Iran; the President Bush he refers to is Bush 41]

The audio of this speech, well worth listening to, is available from Alternative Radio
(The mp3 was too large for me to upload it to this blog.)

Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, was perhaps this country’s premier radical historian. He was born in Brooklyn in 1922. His parents, poor immigrants, were constantly moving to stay, as he once told me, “one step ahead of the landlord.” After high school, he went to work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. During World War II, he saw combat duty as an air force bombardier. After the war, he went to Columbia University on the GI Bill. He taught at Spelman, the all black women’s college in Atlanta. He was an active figure in the civil rights movement and served on the board of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was fired by Spelman for his activism.

He was among the first to oppose U.S. aggression in Indochina. His book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal was an instant classic. A principled opponent of imperialism and militarism, he was an advocate of nonviolent civil disobedience. He spoke and marched against the U.S. wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. His masterpiece, A People’s History of the United States, continues to sell in huge numbers. Among his many books are A Power Governments Cannot Suppress and Original Zinn. Just before his death he completed his last great project, the documentary The People Speak.

Always ready to lend a hand, he believed in and practiced solidarity. Witty, erudite, generous, and loved, Howard Zinn, friend and teacher, passed away on January 27, 2010. His words inspire many the world over, “We don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. To live now, as human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

I suppose because I think that the great danger of what has just happened is what the Administration wanted to happen, that is, to fight a war that would make war acceptable once more. The Vietnam War gave war a bad name. The people who lead this country have been trying ever since to find a war that would give war a good name. They think they’ve found it. I think it’s important for us to sit back and think about not just the Gulf War, not just the Vietnam War, not just this or that war, but to think about the problem of war, of just and unjust war.

We’ve had all these conferences. All of you who were around at the beginning of the twentieth century remember the Hague Conferences and the Geneva Conferences of the 1930s limiting the techniques of war because you can’t do away with war, all you can do is make war more moral. Einstein went to one of these conferences. I don’t know how many of you know that. We like to bring up things that people don’t know. [laughter] What is scholarship, anyway? [laughter, applause] Einstein was horrified at World War I, as so many were, that great war for democracy, for freedom, to end all wars, etc. Ten million men die on the battlefield in World War I and nobody, at the end of it, understands why, what for. World War I gave war a bad name. Until World War II came along.

But Einstein was horrified by World War I. He devoted a lot of time to thinking and worrying about it. He went to this conference in Geneva. He thought they were discussing disarmament, to do away with the weapons of war and therefore to prevent war. Instead, he found these representatives of various countries discussing what kinds of weapons would be suitable and what kind of weapons needed to be prohibited. What were good weapons and bad weapons, just weapons and unjust weapons? Einstein did something which nobody ever expected. He did something really uncharacteristic: He called a press conference. The whole international press came, because Einstein was, well, he was Einstein. They came, and he told this press conference how horrified he was by what he had heard at the international conference. He said, “One does not make wars less likely by formulating rules of warfare. War cannot be humanized. It can only be abolished.” We still have that problem of just and unjust wars, of unjust wars taking place and then another war takes place which looks better, has a better rationale, is easier to defend, and so now we’re confronted with a “just” war and war is made palatable again. So now the attempt is to put Vietnam behind us, that unjust war, and now we have a just war. Or at least a quick one, a real smashing victory.

I had a student a few years ago who was writing something about war. I don’t know why a student of mine should write about war. But she said, “I guess wars are like wines. There are good years and bad years. But war is not like wine. War is like cyanide. One drop and you’re dead.” I thought that was good.

What often is behind this business of “we can’t do anything about war” and “war, be realistic, accept it, just try to fool around with the edges of it”—of course we see how successful they’ve been at humanizing the means of war with all these conferences—is a very prevalent notion that you sometimes hear a lot when people begin discussing the war. Fourteen minutes into any discussion of war someone says, “It’s human nature.” Don’t you hear that a lot? You just get a group of people together to discuss war and at some point somebody will say, “It’s human nature.” There’s no evidence, whatever evidence you could produce to see what human nature is, genetic evidence? Biological evidence? There’s no evidence that this is human nature. All we have is historical evidence.

There’s no biological evidence, no genetic evidence, no anthropological evidence. If you had anthropological evidence, look at these primitive tribes and what they do, “Ah, these tribes are fierce.” “Ah, these tribes are gentle.” It’s just not clear at all. And what about history? There’s a history of wars and also a history of kindness. But it’s like the newspapers and the historians dwell on wars and cruelty and the bestial things that people do to one another. They don’t dwell a lot on the magnificent things that people do for one another in everyday life again and again. It seems to me it only takes a little bit of thought to realize that if wars came out of human nature, out of some spontaneous urge to kill, then why is it that governments have to go to such tremendous lengths to mobilize populations to go to war? It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? They really have to work at it. They have to dredge up enormous numbers of reasons. They have to inundate the airwaves with these reasons. They have to bombard people with slogans and statements and then, in case people aren’t really persuaded, they have to threaten them. They have to draft them if they haven’t persuaded enough people to go into the armed forces, then they have to draft them into the armed forces. Of course the persuasion into the armed forces also includes a certain amount of economic persuasion. You make sure you have a very poor underclass in society so that you give people a choice between starving or going into the military. But if persuasion doesn’t work and enticements don’t work, then anybody who doesn’t want to sign for the draft or who goes into the army and decides to leave is going to be courtmartialed and go to prison. They have to go to great lengths to get people to go to war. They work very hard at it.

What’s interesting also is that they have to make moral appeals. That should say something about human nature, if there is something to be said about human nature. It must suggest that there must be some moral element in human nature. Granted that human beings are capable of all sorts of terrible things, human beings are capable of all sorts of wonderful things, but there must be something in human beings which makes them respond to moral appeals. Most humans don’t respond to appeals to go to war on the basis of “Let’s go and kill.” No, “Let’s go and free somebody. Let’s go and establish democracy. Let’s go and topple this tyrant. Let’s do this so that wars will finally come to an end.” Most people are not like Theodore Roosevelt. [laughter, applause] Just before the Spanish-American War Theodore Roosevelt said to a friend, “In strict confidence I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.” Well. No moral appeal there. [laughter] Just we need a war. You may know that George Bush, when he entered the White House, took the portrait that Reagan had put up there to inspire him, a portrait of Calvin Coolidge [laughter], because he knew that Calvin Coolidge was one of the most inspiring people in the history of this country. Coolidge had said: “The business of America is business.” [laughter] Bush took down the portrait of Calvin Coolidge and put up the portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t want to make too much of this. [laughter] But I will. [laughter]. What Theodore Roosevelt said, Bush might just as well have said. Bush wanted war.

Every step in the development of this Persian Gulf War indicated, from the moment that the invasion of Kuwait was announced, everything that Bush did fits in perfectly with the fact that Bush wanted war. He was determined to have war. He was determined not to prevent this war from taking place. You can just tell this from the very beginning: no negotiations, no compromise, no—what was that ugly word?—linkage. Bush made linkage the kind of word that made you tremble. I always thought that things were linked naturally. Everybody was linked, issues were linked, I thought that even the countries in the Middle East were somehow linked, and that the issues in the Middle East were somehow linked. [laughter] No negotiations, no linkage, no compromise. He sends Baker to meet—that’s a long trip to Geneva, and people got excited. Baker’s going to meet the Foreign Minister of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, in Geneva. What are they going to do? Bush says, no negotiations. Why are you going? Are you a frequent flyer? [laughter, applause] Amazing. No negotiations right up to the end. Who knows if Saddam Hussein in any of those little overtures that were made, I don’t know how serious he was or what would have happened, but the fact is there were overtures that came, yes, even from Saddam Hussein, and they were absolutely and totally neglected. One came from a former member of the Foreign Service of the United States who brought it personally from the Middle East and gave it to Scowcroft. No response, no response at all. Bush wanted this war.

But, as I said, there aren’t a lot of people, fortunately, like Theodore Roosevelt and Bush. Most people do not want war. Most people, if they are going to support a war, have to be given reasons that have to do with morality, with right and wrong, with justice and lack of justice, with tyranny and opposing tyranny. I think it’s important to take a look at the process by which populations are, as this one was in a very short time, brought to support a war, a process which took a nation which, on the eve of war, you remember in surveys before January 15 the surveys all showed that the American public was divided half and half, 46% to 47% on the issue of, should we use force to solve this problem in the Middle East. Half and half. Of course, after the bombs started falling in Iraq, it suddenly became 75% and 80%. What is this process of persuasion? It seems to me we should take a look at the elements of that, because it’s important to know that, to be able to deal with it and talk to people about it, especially since that 80% or 85% or now they report 89.3%, whatever, must be a very shallow percentage. It must be very thin, I think. It must be very temporary and can be made more temporary than it is. It must be shallow because half of those people before the bombs fell did not believe in the use of force. Public opinion, as we know, is very volatile. So to look at the elements by which people are persuaded is to begin to think about how to talk to at least that 50% and maybe more that is willing to reconsider whether this war was really just and necessary and right, and whether any war in our time could be just and necessary and right.

I think one of the elements that goes into this process of persuasion is the starting point that the U.S. is a good society. Since we’re a good society, our wars are good. If we’re a good society, we’re going to do good things. We do good things at home. We have a Bill of Rights and color television. There are lots of good things you can say if you leave out enough. It’s like ancient Athens. Athens goes to war against Sparta. Athens must be on the right side because Athens is a better society than Sparta. Athens is more cultured. Sure, you have to overlook a few things about ancient Athens, like slavery. But still, it really is a better society, so the notion is that Athens fighting Sparta is probably a good war. But you have to overlook things, do a very selective job of analyzing your own society before you come to the conclusion that yours is so good a society that unadorned goodness must spill over into everything you do, including everything you do to other people abroad. What is required, it seems to me, is, in the case of the U.S. as the good society doing good things in the world, simply to look at a bit of history. It’s only if you were born yesterday and also if today you don’t look around very sharply that you can come to the conclusion that we are so good a society that you can take the word of the government that any war we get into will be a right and a just war. But it doesn’t take too much looking into American history to see that we have a long history of aggression.

Talk about naked aggression. A long history of naked aggression. How did we get so big? [laughter] We started out as a thin band of colonies along the East Coast and soon we were at the Pacific and expanding. It’s not a biological thing, that you just expand. No. We expanded by force, conquest, aggression. Sure it says, “Florida Purchase” on those little maps that we used to have in elementary school, a map with colors on them, blue for Florida Purchase, orange Mexican Cession. A purchase. Just a business deal. Nothing about Andrew Jackson going into Florida and killing a number of people in order to per- suade the Spaniards to sell Florida to us. No money actually passed hands, but we’ll ignore that. [laughter] Mexican Cession. Mexico “ceded” California and Colorado and New Mexico and Arizona. They ceded all of that to us. Why? [laughter] Good neighbors. [laughter] Latin American hospitality. Ceded to us. There was a war, a war which we provoked, which President Polk planned for in advance, as so many wars are planned for in advance. An incident takes place and they say, Oh, wow, an incident took place. We’ve got to go to war. That was also a fairly short war and a decisive victory and soon we had 40% of Mexico. And it’s all ours. California and all of that.

Expansion. The Louisiana Purchase. I remember how
proud I was way back when I first looked at that map and saw “Louisiana Purchase.” It doubled the size of my country, and it was just by purchase. It was an empty space. We just bought it. I really didn’t learn anything, they didn’t tell me when they gave me that stuff in history class that there were Indians living in that territory. Indians had to be fought in battle after battle, war after war. They had to be killed, exterminated. The buffalo herds, their means of subsistence, had to be destroyed, they had to be driven out of that territory so that the Louisiana Purchase could be ours. It’s a long history of expansion in the U.S.

Then we began to go overseas. There was that brief period in American history, the period the textbooks call—that honest moment of a textbook—where it has a chapter called “The Age of Imperialism.” [laughter] 1898 to 1903. [laughter, applause] There, too, we went into Cuba to save the Cubans. We are always helping people. Saving people from somebody. So we went in and saved the Cubans from Spain and immediately planted our military bases and our corporations in Cuba. Then there was Puerto Rico. A few shells fired and Puerto Rico is ours. In the meantime Teddy Roosevelt is swimming out into the Pacific after the Philippines. Not contiguous to the U.S. People didn’t know. McKinley didn’t know where the Philippines were. And Senator Beveridge of Indiana said, “The Philippines not contiguous to the U.S.? Our Navy will make it contiguous.” History of expansion, aggression, and continuing on.

We become a world power. Around 1905-1907, the first books began to appear about American history which used that phrase “America as a world power.” That in fact was what we intended to do, to become a world power. It took World War I and then World War II. We kept moving up and the old imperial powers were being shoved out of the way, one by one. Now the Middle East comes in. In World War II Saudi Arabia becomes one of our friendly places. The English are being pushed out more and more out of this oil territory. The Americans are going to come in. Of the “Seven Sisters,” the seven great oil corporations, five of them will be American, one will be British. In the years after World War II, of course, the Soviet Union is the other great power, but we are expanding and our influence is growing and our military bases are spreading all over the world and we are intervening wherever we can to make sure that things go our way. While it was thought that anti-communism with the Soviet Union, the other great superpower, was the central motive for American foreign policy in the postwar period, I think it’s more accurate to say that the problem was not communism, the problem was independence of American power. It didn’t matter whether a country was turning communist or not, it mattered that a country was showing independence and not falling in line with what the United States conceived of as its responsibility as a world power. So in 1953 the government in Iran was overthrown and Mossadeq came into power. He was not a communist but a nationalist. He was a nationalist also because he nationalized the oil. That is intolerable. Those things are intolerable, just as Arbenz in Guatemala the following year. He’s not a communist, well, he’s a little left of center, maybe a few socialist ideas, maybe he talks to communists. But he’s not a communist. But he nationalized United Fruit lands. That’s intolerable.

He offers to pay them. That proves that he’s certainly not a real revolutionary. A real revolutionary wouldn’t give a cent to United Fruit. I wouldn’t. [laughter, applause] I’ve always considered myself a real revolutionary because I wouldn’t pay a cent to anybody like United Fruit. He offered to pay them the price of their land, the price that they had declared for tax purposes. [laughter] Sorry. That won’t go. So the CIA goes to work and overthrows the Arbenz government. The Allende government in Chile also. Not a communist government, a little Marxist, a little socialist, quite a lot of civil liberties and freedom of the press, but independence—more independent than the United States and the other governments of Chile, a government that’s not going to be friendly to Anaconda Copper and ITT and other corporations of the U.S. that have always had their way in Latin America. That’s the real problem.

That history of expansion, of intervention, not even to talk about Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. Not to talk about all the tyrants that we kept in power, of all the aggressions not just that we committed but that we watched other countries commit as we stood silently by because we approved of those aggressions. The record of the U.S. in dealing with naked aggression in the world, looking at a little bit of history, is so shocking, so abysmal, that nobody with any sense of history could possibly accept the argument that we were now sending troops into the Middle East because the U.S. government is morally outraged at the invasion of another country. That Bush’s heart goes out to the people of Kuwait, who are suffering under oppression. Bush’s heart never went out to the people of El Salvador, suffering under the oppression of a government which we were supplying with arms again and again, tens and tens and tens of thousands of people were being killed. His heart never went out to those people. Or the people in Guatemala, again whose government we were supplying with arms. It’s a long list.

It is a moral appeal based on people’s forgetting of history and on the ability of the mass media and the Administration to obliterate history, certainly not to bring it up. You talk about the responsibility of the press. Does the press have no responsibility to teach any history to the people who read its newspaper columns? To remind people of what has happened five, ten, twenty, forty years ago? Was the press also born yesterday and has forgotten everything that has happened before last week? The press complained about military censorship. Of course, the big problem was not military censorship. The problem was self-censorship. [applause]

Another element in this process of persuasion is to create a Manichean situation, good versus evil. I’ve just talked about the good, us. But you also have to present the other as total evil. As the only evil. Granted, Saddam Hussein, is an evil guy. I say that softly. But he is. No question about it. Most heads of government are. [laughter, applause] But it’s not necessary, if you want to bring a nation to war against an evil person, it’s not enough to say that this person is evil. You have to cordon him off from all the other tyrants of the world, all the other evil leaders of government in order to establish that this is the one tyrant of the world whom we have to get. He is responsible for the trouble in the world. If we could only get him, we will solve our problems, just as a few years ago if we could only get Noriega, we will solve the drug trade problem. We got Noriega, and obviously we’ve solved the drug trade problem. But the demonization is necessary, the creation of this one evil shutting out everything. Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. Not letting people be aware of, and I didn’t see the media paying any attention to this, to the latest reports of Amnesty International, which, if you read the 1990 report of Amnesty International, they have a few pages on each country. There are a lot of countries. A few pages on Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Israel. You look through those pages and all those countries that I have just named show differences in degree but the same pattern of treatment of people who are dissenters, dissidents, troublemakers in their own country. In Israel, of course, it’s the Palestinians. Israel has a free atmo- sphere, but in the occupied territories, Israel behaves the way Saudi Arabia behaves towards its own people and the way Syria and Turkey do. You see the same pattern in the Amnesty International reports, the same words appearing again and again. Imprisonment without trial. Detention without communication with the outside. Torture. Killing. For all of these countries. But if you want to make war on them, you single one out, blot out the others, even use them as allies and forget about their record. Then you go in. You persuade people that we’re against tyranny, aren’t we? We’re against brutality, aren’t we? This is the repository of all the evil that there is in the world. There are times when people talked that way. Why are we at war? We’ve got to get him. We’ve got to get Saddam Hussein. What about the whole world? Saddam Hussein. Got to get him.

I would like to get him. I would like to get all of them. But I’m not willing to kill 100,000 or 500,000 or a million people to get rid of them. I think we have to find ways to get rid of tyrants that don’t involve mass slaughter. That’s our problem. [applause] It’s very easy to talk about the brutality. Governments are brutal, and some governments are more brutal than others. Saddam Hussein is particularly brutal. But Saddam Hussein uses chemical weapons and gas. That kept coming up. I remember Congressman Stephen Solarz, the great war hawk of this period: Saddam Hussein used gas, used chemical warfare. True, ugly and brutal. But what about us? We used napalm in Vietnam. We used Agent Orange, which is chemical warfare. I don’t know how you characterize napalm. We used cluster bombs in Iraq. Cluster bombs are not designed to knock down military hardware. They are anti- personnel weapons which shoot out thousands of little pellets which embed themselves in people’s bodies. When I was in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War I saw x-rays of kids lying in hospital beds showing the pellets in the various organs of their bodies. That’s what cluster bombs are. But gas? No. Chemical weapons? No. Napalm, yes. Cluster bombs, yes. White phosphorus, yes. Agent Orange, yes. They’re going to kill people by gas. We’re going to kill people by blowing them up. You can tell who is the cruel wager of war and who is the gentlemanly wager of war.

You can persuade people of that if you simply don’t mention things or don’t remind people. Once you remind people of these things they remember. If you remind people about napalm they remember. If you say, you know, the newspapers haven’t told you about the cluster bombs, they say, oh yes, that’s true. People aren’t beastly and vicious. But when information is withheld from them—the American population was bombarded in this war the way the Iraqi population was bombarded. [applause] It was a war against us, a war of lies and disinformation and omission of history. That kind of war, overwhelming and devastating, waged here in the U.S. while that war was waged over there.

Another element in this process of persuasion is simply to take what seems like a just cause and turn it into a just war. There’s this interesting jump that takes places between just cause and just war. A cause may be just: yes, it’s wrong for Saddam Hussein to go into Kuwait, it’s wrong for this and that to happen. The question is, does it them immediately follow that if the cause is just, if an injustice has been committed, that the proper response to that is war. It’s that leap of logic that needs to be absolutely avoided. North Korea invades South Korea in 1950. It’s unjust, it’s wrong. It’s a just cause. What do you do? You go to war. You wage war for three years. You kill a million Koreans. And at the end of the three years, where are you? Where you were before. North Korea is still a dictatorship. South Korea is still a dictatorship. Only a million people are dead. You can see this again and again, jumping from a just cause to an overwhelming use of violence to presumably rectify this just cause, which it never does. What war does, even if it starts with an injustice, is multiply the injustice. If it starts on the basis of violence, it multiplies the violence. If it starts on the basis of defending yourself against brutality, then you end up becoming a brute.

You see this in World War II, the best of wars. The war that gave wars such a good name that they’ve used it ever since as a metaphor to justify every war that’s taken place since then. All you have to do in order to justify war is to mention World War II, mention Churchill, mention Munich. Use the word “appeasement.” That’s all you need to take the glow of that good war and spread it over any ugly act that you are now committing in order to justify it. But World War II had good cause. Just cause against fascism. I volunteered. I went into the Air Force and became a bombardier and dropped bombs on Germany, France, Czechoslovakia, Hungary. I thought it was a just cause. Therefore you drop bombs. It wasn’t until after the war that I thought about this and studied and went back to visit a little town in France that I and a lot of the Air Force had bombed, had in fact dropped napalm on, the first use of napalm that I know of was this mission that we flew a few weeks before the end of World War II. We had no idea what it was. They said it was a new type of thing we were carrying. We went over and just bombed the hell out of a few thousand German soldiers who were hanging around a town in France waiting for the war to end. They weren’t doing anything. So we obliterated them and the French town near Bordeaux on the Atlantic coast of France.

I thought about that, about Dresden, the deliberate bombing of civilian populations in Germany, in Tokyo. Eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand people died in that night of bombing. After our outrage, our absolute outrage at the beginning of World War II when Hitler bombed Coventry and Rotterdam and a thousand people were killed. How inhuman to bomb civilian populations. By the end of World War II we had become brutalized. Hiroshima, Nagasaki and even after that. I have a friend in Japan who was a teenager when the war ended. He lived in Osaka. He remembers very distinctly that on August 14, five days after the bomb dropped on Nagasaki—on Hiroshima August 6, on Nagasaki August 9, the Japanese agreed to surrender on August 15, after Nagasaki it was very clear that they were about to surrender in a matter of days—but on August 14 a thousand planes flew over Japan and dropped bombs on Japanese cities. He remembers on August 14, when everybody thought the war was over, the bombers coming over his city of Osaka and dropping bombs. He remembers going through the streets and the corpses and finding leaflets also dropped along with the bombs saying: the war is over.

Just causes can lead you to think that everything you then do is just. I suppose I’ve come to the conclusion that war, by its nature, being the indiscriminate and mass killing of large numbers of people, cannot be justified for any political cause, any ideological cause, any territorial boundary, any tyranny, any aggression. Tyrannies, aggressions, injustices, of course they have to be dealt with. No appeasement. They give us this multiple choice: appeasement or war. Come on! You mean to say between appeasement and war there aren’t a thousand other possibilities? Is human ingenuity so defunct, is our intelligence so lacking that we cannot devise ways of dealing with tyranny and injustice without killing huge numbers of people? It’s like the police. The only way you can deal with a speeding motorist is to take him out of his car and beat the hell out of him, fracture his skull in ten different places? It’s a sickness of our time. Somehow at the beginning of it is some notion of justice and rightness. But that process has to be examined, reconsidered. If people do think about it they have second thoughts about it.

One of the elements of this process of persuasion is simply to play on people’s need for community, for national unity. What better way to get national unity than around a war? It’s much easier, simpler, quicker. And of course it’s better for the people who run the country to get national unity around a war than to get national unity around giving free medical care to everybody in the country. [applause] Surely we could build national unity. We could create a sense of national purpose. We could have people hanging out yellow ribbons for doing away with unemployment and homelessness. We could do what is done when any group of people decides and the word goes out and the air waves are used to unite people to help one another instead of to kill one another. It can be done. People do want to be part of a larger community. Warmakers take advantage of that very moral and decent need for community and unity and being part of a whole and to use it for the most terrible of purposes. But it can be used the other way too.

The reason I’ve gone into what I see as this process of persuasion and the elements of persuasion is that I think that all of them are undoable. History can be learned. Facts can be brought in. People can be reminded of things that they already know. People do have common sense when they are taken away briefly from this hysteria which is created in a time of war. I can only describe what’s happened in these last few months as a kind of national hysteria created by the government and collaborated in by the media. When you have an opportunity to lift the veil of that hysteria and take people away from under it and talk to people, then you see the possibilities. When you appeal to people’s sense of proportion: What is more important? What is it that we have to do? People know that there are things that have to be done to make life better. People know that the planet is in danger, and that is far more serious than ever getting Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. [applause] Far more serious. I think people also may be aware in some dim way—every once in a while I think of it, and I imagine other people must think of it, too—that here it is, 1991, we’re coming to the end of the century. We should be able, by the end of this century, to eliminate war as a way of solving international disputes. We should have decided, people all over the world, that we’re going to use our energy and our resources to create a new world order, but not his new world order, not the new world order of war, but a new world order in which people help one another, in which we divide the enormous wealth of the world in humane and rational ways. It’s possible to do that. So I’m just suggesting that we think about that. I feel that there’s something that needs to be done and something that can be done and that we can all participate in it. Thank you.

Other AR Howard Zinn programs available at www.alternativeradio.org:
A People’s History of the U.S.
Voices of a People’s History
The Case of Sacco & Vanzetti
Confronting Government Lies
History Matters
Resistance & the Role of Artists
Critical Thinking
Air-Brushing History
A World Without Borders
Overcoming Obstacles
War & Civil Disobedience
Against Discouragement

For information about obtaining CDs, MP3s, or transcripts of this or other programs, please contact: David Barsamian
Alternative Radio
P.O. Box 551
Boulder, CO 80306-0551
(800) 444-1977
info@alternativeradio.org

www.alternativeradio.org

©2011