Bulletin 135
 
 

On the Politics of Hatred (la haine idéologique) : From CEIMSA-IN-EXILE (THE CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS).

4 September 2004
Grenoble, France

Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,

Since the beginning of the politics of reaction in the
U.S. , at the start of the Reagan Administration, ideological hatred has been re-employed as an organizing principle. The ideology of Anti-Communism of the 1950s and 60s mutated into the ideology of Anti-Liberalism in the 1980s. The "L... word", as the Reagan/Bush team repeated endlessly, was the enemy.

Today, we are witnessing the continuation of what might appear as ideologically driven public policies, which serve to organize the masses and discipline institutions (i.e. introduce self-censorship) such as the media and the education industries.

However, American scholar Michael Parenti argues in his book, Democracy for the Few, that the ideology of Anti-Communism historically served as a political ploy, it was never constructed with the intention to put an end to communism. Instead, this post world-war-II ideology served to lubricate a virtual cash cow. This money machine was the military industry, or more precisely the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower called it in 1961. From this perspective, we can see the logical consistency of law-makers in Washington who voted to export grain and other commodities to the Soviet Union (to feed "Communists" in Russia) while at the same time they voted to kill "Communists" in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc....  The bottom line was the opportunity for higher profits and greater returns on capital investments. There was no contradiction between these two
U.S. government policies . . . .

Ideologies, it would appear, are like the clothes we wear. Gabriel Kolko points out in his book, A Century of War, that
U.S. policy makers have consistently changed their ideologies according to their needs at the moment, as one might put on and take off a sweater, according to changes in the weather.


If true, this insight might explain why, in our post-cold-war era, the ideology of Anti-Terrorism has served to help U.S. policy makers mobilize killing fields in Afghanistan and in Iraq, while at the same time continuing very profitable financial and trade relations with Saudi Arabia, the origin of the 9/11 "surprise attack" against the United States.

For an excellent discussion of the "revolving door" phenomenon in Washington, D.C. (from-corporate-to-government-back-to-corporate employment), readers should see Craig Unger's book House of Bush, House of Saud, the secret relationship between the world's two most powerful dynasties. And for an historical perspective on what is quickly becomming "America's Afghanistan", which in the opinion and purpose of U.S. policy-maker Zbignew Brzezinski, was "Russia's Vietnam" in the 1980s, readers are directed to what Gilbert Achcar has described as the definitive study of the history of social movements within Iraq : Hanna Batatu's book, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq.


Manufacturing a cash cow and securing its private ownership by
U.S. military defense in western Asia, according to the very-well documented book, Behind the Invasion of Iraq, was the objective of this particular "dress code", the ideological clothing of Anti-Terrorism. (And, of course, the real causes of terrorism have not and cannot be addressed. The public has been paradoxed into silence : discussing the causes of terrorism, with the aim of putting an end to terrorism, is in itself an act of terrorism.)

The conclusion is that ideology serves essential economic interests (and not the reverse), and the ideology of hatred, as George Orwell illustrated so well in his book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, serves well as an organizing principle to mobilize populations, so they can be easily controlled and, if necessary, provided small incentives to collaborate with policies designed by powerful private interests.


Below, please find the copy of an article recently sent to CEIMSA by several different sources -both French and American- who are interested in understanding the many mutations within American institutions. This recent article by the well-known American entertainer, Garrison Keillor, is a good example of the capacity of self-awareness inside the
United States . His is a voice which demonstrates that millions of Americans are indeed aware of what is happening to them. In the proverbial aquarium, the water has become increasingly foul and it is noticeable from within, as well as from the outside.


Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université Stendhal
Grenoble 3

__________________________


We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
  By Garrison Keillor
copyright In These Times, 26 August 2004

How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?

  Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic
Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam , and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned - and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

  In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. 'Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,' says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. 'I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.' The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

  The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.

  Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.

  Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy - the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president's personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.

  The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good.

  Our beloved land has been fogged with fear - fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.

  There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn't the
Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn't the 'end of innocence,' or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn't prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.

  Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing done in his second term.

  This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the
World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.

  The
Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

  This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we're not getting any younger.

  Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.
  -------

Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion, now in its 25th year on the air. This adapted excerpted from Keillor's new book, Homegrown Democrat (© 2004) is reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.



******************

Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research at CEIMSA-IN-EXILE
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/index.html