Bulletin N°236
Subject: ON PREDATORS, PARASITES, AND PEDESTRIANS: FROM THE
CENTER FOR THE ADVANCED STUDY OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL
MOVEMENTS, GRENOBLE, FRANCE.
1 June 2006
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
From the books we are reading on communication theory and systems
analysis, we have learned that in open, goal-seeking systems the
causes
of events are found in the
goals sought (taking into
account the constraints encountered while seeking these goals). Anthony
Wilden uses the example of the drive home : As we leave headed for our
destination, he explains, we have many choices on how to proceed. We
choose our path by rejecting alternative ways, but as we approach our
destination our choices become more and more limited, until we have no
alternative than to pull into the driveway (or dive into our bed, as
the case may be). The
cause of our actions is the
goal we
have set and the constraints we have encountered; not our original
departure.
This week began with Pope Benedict XVI's homecoming visit to Germany.
Arriving at the notorious Polish concentration camp, Auschwitz, the
Pope declared himself "a
son of the German people". On Sunday, 28 May, on the same deathcamp
grounds,
he
asked God why He remained silent during the "unprecedented mass
crimes" of the Holocaust. As is often the case, what was
not said
was more important that what was actually said at this historic moment
in Auschwitz. Pope Benedict XVI did
not ask why
the
Church had
remained silent. He did
not ask
why he himself had joined the
Hitler's Youth organization.
He did
not question the
political economy that
gave rise to fascism,
nor did he refer to the
mass
psychology of collaborators, which was a necessary part for this
murderous system to flourish. Instead
His Eminence focused on a
small group of German leaders; he suggested that he was simply
"a
son of that people over which a ring
of criminals rose to power by
false promises of future greatness." Some would argue that
this version of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany is
a
falsification of history.
As state capitalism (aka
corporatism) makes new inroads into
our lives, attempting to obliterate collective memory and all
possibilities for future resistance in the form of alternative
ideologies, including radical critiques of the system of private
control over capital, a new authoritarianism engulfs many of us, who
are identified as the "enemies" of capitalism within capitalist
institutions. We live in a time of
corporate hegemony.
Italian fascist literature of the 1930s ignores the
abject
servility toward
corporate power, which
Pier
Paolo Pasolini depicted as a classic
sadomasochistic relationship.
French collaboration
literature in the 1940s conceals the
quiet lives of desperation,
the humiliation, the linguistic obfuscations of a conquered people, who
were systematically starved by Nazi expropriations of food stuff which
served to create a consumer society for
civilians in Germany during the war --what Walter Benjamin called the
fascist "
aestheticizing
of politics."
This history would offer useful information today on why not to
collaborate with the new authoritarianism that many find to be
descending upon us. Professor Anthony Wilden writes of this
homogenization
process which historically accompanies the capitalist drive for
new markets:
- The genetic diversity of
an individual or a population is guided, translated, and transformed by
the
- social diversity.... Social
diversity works to preserve the system's personal, psychological, and
economic
- flexibility, and thus helps to
maintain the single most important condition for long-range survival in
relation
- to the environment, which is of
course all the more significant if the environment is changing or being
changed
- by society....
- Unlike our own
society many of the other societies never chose to go beyond
relationships of co-evolution
- and co-adaptation with the natural
environment, choosing instead what might be called 'social symbiosis'
.... the
- economic and ecological relations
of those types of society ... if undisturbed by catastrophe, can last
forever.
- It may be objected
here that the other societies did not develop the flexibility to know
how to survive modern
- capitalism, but then as yet we
don't know how to survive it either.
- Co-evolution did not
of course exclude war, ritual murder, slavery, or cannibalism --we are
not talking about the noble
- savage of
sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century romanticism. As Marvin Harris argues
most convincingly in Cannibals and
- Kings (1977), individual
human beings and entire societies can be brought up to love war,
killing, brutality, or human
- flesh as easily as they can be
brought up to hate and detest them, such is the vast power of society
and culture over
- the actual expression in real life
of our genetic potential as organisms. (Wilden, 1987,
p.105)
Below are articles recently received by CEIMSA which offer information
on "what went wrong" with American society. They serve to illustrate
some of the dangers that modern capitalist societies have generated in
recent years.
Item
A. is an exposé on
the
many civilian massacres (more than 250,000 Iraqi civilians have
been murdered since the invasion of 2003) carried out by U.S. troops
and private U.S. security forces in Iraq.
Item
B. is an article sent to us by
Dr. John Gerassi of Queens College, New York City, reminding us of a
history of nuclear proliferation, Britain's sales of nuclear materials
to Israel.
Item
C. is an excerpt from Noam
Chomsky's new book,
Failed
States, sent to us b
y Stenhdhal University Professor
Sheila Whittick.
Item
D. is a science fiction piece
seeking real understanding of "what went wrong" in America after the
1960s, sent to us by Frédéric Méni, student in
American Studies at the University of Grenoble 3.
Item
E. is an essay on the
investigation of secret police spying at the University of
California-Santa Cruz campus.
And, finally, item
F. is an
historical perspective of "what went wrong" in the American left from
Stanley Aronowitz, and sent to us with comments by San Diego community
organizer, Monty Kroopkin.
Sincerely,
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université Stendhal-Grenoble III
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
_____________
A.
from Dahr Jamail :
Date : 30 May 2006
Subject : Iraq Dispatches: Countless My Lai Massacres in Iraq
http://dahrjamailiraq.com
**
Countless My Lai Massacres in Iraq
by Dahr Jamail
The media feeding frenzy around what has been referred to as "Iraq's My
Lai" has become frenetic. Focus on US Marines slaughtering at least 20
civilians in Haditha last November is reminiscent of the media spasm
around the "scandal" of Abu Ghraib during April and May 2004.
Yet just like Abu Ghraib, while the media spotlight shines squarely on
the Haditha massacre, countless atrocities continue daily, conveniently
out of the awareness of the general public. Torture did not stop simply
because the media finally decided, albeit in horribly belated fashion,
to cover the story, and the daily slaughter of Iraqi civilians by US
forces and US-backed Iraqi "security" forces has not stopped either.
Earlier this month, I received a news release from Iraq, which read,
"On Saturday, May 13th, 2006, at 10:00 p.m., US Forces accompanied by
the Iraqi National Guard attacked the houses of Iraqi people in the
Al-Latifya district south of Baghdad by an intensive helicopter
shelling. This led the families to flee to the Al-Mazar and water
canals to protect themselves from the fierce shelling. Then seven
helicopters landed to pursue the families who fled … and killed them.
The number of victims amounted to more than 25 martyrs. US forces
detained another six persons including two women named Israa Ahmed
Hasan and Widad Ahmed Hasan, and a child named Huda Hitham Mohammed
Hasan, whose father was killed during the shelling."
The report from the Iraqi NGO called The Monitoring Net of Human Rights
in Iraq (MHRI) continued, "The forces didn't stop at this limit. They
held an attack on May 15th, 2006, supported also by the Iraqi National
Guards. They also attacked the families' houses, and arrested a number
of them while others fled. US snipers then used the homes to target
more Iraqis. The reason for this crime was due to the downing of a
helicopter in an area close to where the forces held their attack."
The US military preferred to report the incident as an offensive where
they killed 41 "insurgents," a line effectively parroted by much of the
media.
On that same day, MHRI also reported that in the Yarmouk district of
Baghdad, US forces raided the home of Essam Fitian al-Rawi. Al-Rawi was
killed along with his son Ahmed; then the soldiers reportedly removed
the two bodies along with Al-Rawi's nephew, who was detained.
Similarly, in the city of Samara on May 5, MHRI reported, "American
soldiers entered the house of Mr. Zidan Khalif Al-Heed after an attack
upon American soldiers was launched nearby the house. American soldiers
entered this home and killed the family, including the father, mother
and daughter who is in the 6th grade, along with their son, who was
suffering from mental and physical disabilities."
This same group, MHRI, also estimated that between 4,000 and 6,000
Iraqi civilians were killed during the November 2004 US assault on
Fallujah. Numbers which make those from the Haditha massacre pale in
comparison.
Instead of reporting incidents such as these, mainstream outlets are
referring to the Haditha slaughter as one of a few cases that "present
the most serious challenge to US handling of the Iraq war since the Abu
Ghraib prison scandal."
Marc Garlasco, of Human Rights Watch, told reporters recently, "What
happened at Haditha appears to be outright murder. The Haditha massacre
will go down as Iraq's My Lai."
Then there is the daily reality of sectarian and ethnic cleansing in
Iraq, which is being carried out by US-backed Iraqi "security" forces.
A recent example of this was provided by a representative of the Voice
of freedom Association for Human Rights, another Iraqi NGO which logs
ongoing atrocities resulting from the US occupation.
"The representative … visited Fursan Village (Bani Zaid) with the Iraqi
Red Crescent Al-Madayin Branch. The village of 60 houses, inhabited by
Sunni families, was attacked on February 27, 2006, by groups of men
wearing black clothes and driving cars from the Ministry of Interior.
Most of the villagers escaped, but eight were caught and immediately
executed. One of them was the Imam of the village mosque, Abu Aisha,
and another was a 10-year-old boy, Adnan Madab. They were executed
inside
the room where they were hiding. Many animals (sheep, cows and dogs)
were shot by the armed men also. The village mosque and most of the
houses were destroyed and burnt."
The representative had obtained the information when four men who had
fled the scene of the massacre returned to provide the details. The
other survivors had all left to seek refuge in Baghdad. "The survivors
who returned to give the details guided the representative and the Red
Crescent personnel to where the bodies had been buried. They [the
bodies] were of men, women and one of the village babies."
The director of MHRI, Muhamad T. Al-Deraji, said of this incident,
"This situation is a simple part of a larger problem that is
orchestrated by the government … the delay in protecting more villagers
from this will only increase the number of tragedies."
Arun Gupta, an investigative journalist and editor with the New York
Indypendent newspaper of the New York Independent Media Center, has
written extensively about US-backed militias and death squads in Iraq.
He is also the former editor at the Guardian weekly in New York and
writes frequently for Z Magazine and Left Turn.
"The fact is, while I think the militias have, to a degree, spiraled
out of US control, it's the US who trains, arms, funds, and supplies
all the police and military forces, and gives them critical logistical
support," he told me this week. "For instance, there were reports at
the beginning of the year that a US army unit caught a "death squad"
operating inside the Iraqi Highway Patrol. There were the usual claims
that the US has nothing to do with them. It's all a big lie. The
American reporters are
lazy. If they did just a little digging, there is loads of material out
there showing how the US set up the highway patrol, established a
special training academy just for them, equipped them, armed them,
built all their bases, etc. It's all in government documents, so it's
irrefutable. But then they tell the media we have nothing to do with
them and they don't even fact check it. In any case, I think the story
is significant only insofar as it shows how the US tries to cover up
its involvement."
Once again, like Abu Ghraib, a few US soldiers are being investigated
about what occurred in Haditha. The "few bad apples" scenario is being
repeated in order to obscure the fact that Iraqis are being slaughtered
every single day. The "shoot first ask questions later" policy, which
has been in effect from nearly the beginning in Iraq, creates
trigger-happy American soldiers and US-backed Iraqi death squads who
have no respect for the lives of the Iraqi people. Yet, rather than
high-ranking members of the Bush administration who give the orders,
including Bush himself, being tried for the war crimes they are most
certainly guilty of, we have the ceremonial "public hanging" of a few
lowly soldiers for their crimes committed on the ground.
In an interview with CNN on May 29th concerning the Haditha massacre,
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace commented,
"It's going to be a couple more weeks before those investigations are
complete, and we should not prejudge the outcome. But we should, in
fact, as leaders take on the responsibility to get out and talk to our
troops and make sure that they understand that what 99.9 percent of
them are doing, which is fighting with honor and courage, is exactly
what we expect of them."
This is the same Peter Pace who when asked how things were going in
Iraq by Tim Russert on Meet the Press this past March 5th said, "I'd
say they're going well. I wouldn't put a great big smiley face on it,
but I would say they're going very, very well from everything you look
at …"
Things are not "going very, very well" in Iraq. There have been
countless My Lai massacres, and we cannot blame 0.1% of the soldiers on
the ground in Iraq for killing as many as a quarter of a million
Iraqis, when it is the policies of the Bush administration that
generated the failed occupation to begin with.
A must read article on this topic which addresses US and
International Law concerning this atrocity is "The Haditha Massacre" by
Marjorie Cohn posted here < http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/053006J.shtml>.
___________________________
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson
School of Law, President-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the
US representative to the executive committee of the American
Association of Jurists.
Addenda : "Civilian
Slaughter Update"
May 31, 2006
On Tuesday, May 30 Truthout <
http://www.truthout.org/>
published my article "Countles My Lai Massacres in Iraq
<
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/hard_news/archives/newscommentary/000399.php#more
>."
Here are a couple of recent pieces of information to augment that
story :
1. Today the AP has just released this
story:
2
Iraqi women killed by coalition troops : <
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060531/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_women_killed
>
- "BAGHDAD, Iraq - Two Iraqi women were shot to death north of
Baghdad
- after coalition forces fired on a vehicle that failed to stop
at an
- observation post, the U.S. military said Wednesday. Iraqi
police and
- relatives said one of the women was about to give birth."
2. And on May 29, Al-Shaqiyah TV
reported from Iraq : <
http://www.dahrjamailiraq.com/mideastwire/index.php?id=139>
- "US forces killed five civilians and wounded two others in
the city
- [Ramadi] today. A source at Al-Ramadi State Hospital said
that among the
- dead were a child and a woman. An Iraqi officer in Al-Ramadi
said that
- the US forces were beefing up their presence on the periphery
of
- Al-Ramadi, noting that the city will soon come under siege
'ahead of an
- all-out attack such as the one that targeted Al-Fallujah' in
2004."
DJ
_____________
B.
from John Gerassi :
Date : 30 May 2006
Subject : Have you read this?
Francis,
I'm sure you've seen this, but in case...
Cheers tito
- Britain's
dirty secret
- by Meirion Jones
- [Exculsive - Secret papers show how
Britain helped Israel make the A-bomb in the 1960s, supplying tons of
vital chemicals including plutonium and uranium. And it looks as though
Harold Wilson and his ministers knew nothing about it.]
- Mirage jets swoop from the sky to destroy the Egyptian air force
before breakfast; tanks race across the desert to the Suez Canal; Moshe
Dayan, the defence minister, poses with eyepatch after the Jerusalem
brigade has fought its way into the Old City. These are the heroic
images of the Six Day War and they defined Israeli daring: here was a
people who, it seemed, risked everything on a throw of the dice. Years
later the world discovered that there was an insurance policy.
- They had a secret weapon - two, to be precise. In the weeks
before Israel took on the Arab world in June 1967 it put together a
pair of crude nuclear bombs, just in case things didn't go as planned.
Making them required not only Israeli ingenuity but also plenty of help
from abroad. It has been known for some time that the French helped
build Israel's reactor and reprocessing plant at Dimona, but over the
past year our research team at BBC Newsnight has unearthed something no
less astonishing and much closer to home - top-secret files which show
how Britain helped Israel get the atomic bomb.
- We can reveal that while Harold Wilson was prime minister the UK
supplied Israel with small quantities of plutonium despite a warning
from British intelligence that it might "make a material contribution
to an Israeli weapons programme". This, by enabling Israel to study the
properties of plutonium before its own supplies came on line, could
have taken months off the time it needed to make a weapon. Britain also
sold Israel a whole range of other exotic chemicals, including
uranium-235, beryllium and lithium-6, which are used in atom bombs and
even hydrogen bombs. And in Harold Macmillan's time we supplied the
heavy water that allowed Israel to start up its own plutonium
production facility at Dimona - heavy water that British intelligence
estimated would enable Israel to make "six nuclear weapons a year".
- After we exposed the sale of the heavy water on Newsnight last
August, the government assured the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) that all Britain did was sell some heavy water back to Norway.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, we have now obtained previously
top-secret papers which show not only that Norway was a mere cover for
the Israel deal, but that Britain made hundreds of other secret
shipments of nuclear materials to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.
- Tony Benn became technology minister in 1966, while the plutonium
deal was going through. Though the nuclear industry was part of his
brief, nobody told him we were exporting atomic energy materials to
Israel. "I'm not only surprised," he says, "I'm shocked." Neither he
nor his predecessor Frank Cousins agreed to the sales, he insists, and
though he always suspected civil servants of doing deals behind his
back, "it never occurred to me they would authorise something so
totally against the policy of the government".
- The documentary evidence is backed by eyewitness testimony. Back
in August 1960, when covert photographs of a mysterious site at Dimona
in Israel arrived at Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) in Whitehall, a
brilliant analyst called Peter Kelly saw immediately that they showed a
secret nuclear reactor. Today Kelly, physically frail but mentally
acute, lives in retirement on the south coast, and as he leafs through
the "UK Eyes Only" reports he wrote about Israel for MI5 and MI6, he
smiles. "I was quite perceptive," he says. Kelly recognised that the
Dimona reactor was a French design, and he very soon discovered where
the heavy water needed to operate it had come from. When we explain
that the government has told the IAEA that Britain thought it was
selling the heavy water to Norway he laughs heartily.
- What really happened was this: Britain had bought the heavy water
from Norsk Hydro in Norway for its nuclear weapons programme, but found
it was surplus to requirements and decided to sell. An arrangement was
indeed made with a Norwegian company, Noratom, but crucially the papers
show that Noratom was not the true buyer: the firm agreed to broker a
deal with Israel in return for a 2 per cent commission. Israel paid the
top price - £1m - to avoid having to give guarantees that the
material would not be used to make nuclear weapons, but the papers
leave no doubt that Britain knew all along that Israel wanted the heavy
water "to produce plutonium". Kelly discovered that a charade was
played out, with British and Israeli delegations sitting in adjacent
rooms while Noratom ferried contracts between them to maintain the
fiction that Britain had not done the deal with Israel.
- The transaction was signed off for the Foreign Office by Donald
Cape, whose job it was to make sure we didn't export materials that
would help other countries get the atom bomb. He felt it would be
"overzealous" to demand safeguards to prevent Israel using the chemical
in weapons production. Cape is 82 now, tall, clear-headed and living in
Surrey. He told us the deal was done because "nobody suspected the
Israelis hoped to manufacture nuclear weapons", but his own
declassified letters from March 1959 suggest otherwise. They show, for
example, that the Foreign Office knew Israel had pulled out of a deal
to buy uranium from South Africa when Pretoria asked for safeguards to
prevent it being used for making nuclear weapons. It also knew the CIA
was warning that "the Israelis must be expected to try and establish a
nuclear weapons programme". Just weeks later, however, Britain started
shipping heavy water direct to Israel: the first shipment left in June
1959 and the second in June 1960.
- There was another problem: the Americans. There was no US-Israeli
alliance in those days and Washington was determined to prevent nuclear
weapons proliferation. If Britain told the Americans about the Israeli
deal they would stop it. Donald Cape decided on discretion: "I would
rather not tell the Americans." When Newsnight told Robert McNamara -
John F Ken-nedy's defence secretary - about this he was amazed. "The
fact Israel was trying to develop a nuclear bomb should not have come
as a surprise, but that Britain should have supplied it with heavy
water was indeed a surprise to me," he said.
- Kelly's reports for the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) on
"secret atomic activities in Israel" show that Britain's defence and
espionage establishment had no doubt about what was going on in Israel.
Kelly wrote of underground galleries at the Dimona complex; there were
such galleries. He correctly described the French role in the project.
He identified the importance of the heavy water: with 20 tons of this
material, he estimated, Israel could have a reactor capable of
producing "significant quantities of plutonium". British intelligence
also knew about the reprocessing facility at Dimona and stated: "The
separation of plutonium can only mean that Israel intends to produce
nuclear weapons." Kelly even discovered that an Israeli observer had
been allowed to watch one of the first French nuclear tests in Algeria.
- Kelly and his colleagues, however, found their views were being
challenged. Chief of the challengers was Michael Israel Michaels (such
was his middle name, literally), who was a senior official at the
science ministry under Lord Hailsham during the Macmillan government,
and went on to serve at the technology ministry under Benn. He was also
Britain's representative at the IAEA.
- In 1961 Michaels was invited to Israel by the Israeli nuclear
chief Ernst David Bergmann, and while there was given VIP treatment. He
met not only Bergmann but Shimon Peres, the deputy defence minister,
and David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister - the three fathers of the
Israeli atomic bomb. Peter Kelly had warned his superiors that Israel
might use the Michaels trip as part of a disinformation campaign to
show "everything is above board", and this is what appears to have
happened. Michaels's report gave Israel the all-clear, and he handed it
to Hailsham at an important moment, two days before Ben-Gurion met
Macmillan at Downing Street. Kelly later took the report apart line by
line and concluded by offering his own prediction that Israel might
have a "deliverable warhead" by 1967.
- In 1962 the Dimona reactor started operating (thanks to the heavy
water Britain had delivered), yet Michaels continued to protest
Israel's innocence. The Israelis, meanwhile, were allowing the US to
make inspection visits to Dimona once a year to demonstrate that it was
not being used for military purposes, but Kelly saw that this, too, was
a con. The tours were "heavily stage managed", he wrote in 1963, and
"important developments were concealed". He was right: we now know that
false walls screened parts of the plant from the inspectors.
- Three years later, at the beginning of 1966, something
extraordinary happened. The UK Atomic Energy Authority made what it
called a "pretty harmless request" to the government: it wanted to
export ten milligrams of plutonium to Israel. The Ministry of Defence
strongly objected, with Defence Intelligence (Kelly's department)
arguing that the sale might have "significant military value". The
Foreign Office duly blocked it, ruling: "It is HMG's policy not to do
anything which would assist Israel in the production of nuclear
weapons."
- Michaels was furious. He wrote "to protest strongly" against the
decision, saying that small quantities of plutonium were not important
and anyhow if we didn't sell it to the Israelis someone else would.
Michaels could be a bulldozer - he was short and bald, described as
pugnacious and hard-headed by colleagues - and he won his battle.
Eventually the Foreign Office caved in and the sale went ahead.
- What is most surprising about the position adopted by Michaels is
that, as the new documents show, a few years earlier he had taken the
direct opposite view of the value of small quantities of plutonium. In
1961 he received a JIC report suggesting that Israel would take at
least three years to make enough plutonium and then another six months
to work out how to make a bomb. In the margin beside the claim about
the six months he wrote: "This surely is an understatement if the
Israelis have no plutonium on which to experiment in advance." Then it
occurred to him that a friendly power might give Israel a sample of
plutonium to speed up the process: "Perhaps the French have supplied a
small quantity for experimental purposes as we did to the French in
like circumstances some years ago" (see panel, above). What this shows
is that Michaels, in the full knowledge of how useful it could be for
weapons development, went on to persuade the British government to sell
Israel a sample of plutonium.
- Today, Tony Benn can hardly believe that Michaels never referred
the nuclear sales to him. Going through his diaries, Benn finds dozens
of references to meetings with Michaels which show that he didn't trust
him even then. "Michaels lied to me. I learned by bitter experience
that the nuclear industry lied to me again and again." Kelly believes
that Michaels knew all along what Israel was doing, but since he died
in 1992 we can't ask him. According to his son Chris, after Michaels
retired from the IAEA in 1971 the Israelis found him a job in London
for a couple of years.
- The atomic files give details of hundreds more nuclear deals with
Israel. Many are small orders for compounds of uranium, beryllium and
tritium, as well as other materials that can be used for both innocent
and military purposes. In November 1959 someone at the Foreign Office
allowed through the export of a small quantity of uranium-235 to
Israel, apparently without realising that it was a core nuclear
explosive material just like plutonium.
- Some materials may have been for advanced bombs. In 1966 UKAEA
supplied Israel with 1.25 grams of almost pure lithium-6. When combined
with deuterium, this material provides the fusion fuel for hydrogen
bombs. Britain also supplied two tons of unenriched lithium, from which
lithium-6 is extracted - enough for several hydrogen bombs. Deuterium,
incidentally, is normally extracted from heavy water, which, of course,
Britain had already shipped to Israel.
- Throughout this period, Defence Intelligence repeatedly
complained that Israel was the only country getting nuclear export
licences "on the basis of the meaningless phrase 'scientific and
research purposes'". The Department of Trade tried to exempt Israeli
deals completely on the grounds that these were
government-to-government transactions, but DIS was outraged, saying
such deals were meant only for "people like most of our Nato partners
who can be trusted . . . Israel however is a very different kettle of
fish." In August 1966 the Israeli armed forces ordered advanced
radiation dosimeters. The Foreign Office said yes and overruled the
strong objections of the British MoD that they were obviously for use
by troops. DIS wanted to know why Israel was always given special
treatment, adding: "We feel quite strongly about all this."
- Tony Benn wonders whether these deals could have gone ahead
without the knowledge of the British prime ministers of the time,
Macmillan, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and Wilson. The evidence is unclear.
The newly declassified papers show that in 1958 a member of the board
of UKAEA said he was going to refer the heavy-water deal to the
authority's executive, which reported directly to Macmillan, but there
is no record that this happened. We know that Lord Hailsham learned
about the heavy-water deal after it had gone through and concluded that
Israel was "preparing for a weapons programme".
- Benn's initial reaction to whether Wilson knew about the atomic
exports to Israel was that it was "inconceivable". Then he hesitated,
observing, "Harold was sympathetic to Israel," but concluded that no,
he probably did not know. Benn believes that the exports were probably
pushed through by civil servants working with the nuclear industry.
- There was no plausible civilian use for heavy water, plutonium,
U235, highly enriched lithium and many of the other materials shipped
to Israel. The heavy water allowed Israel to fire up Dimona and produce
the plutonium that still sits in Israel's missile warheads today. The
small sample of plutonium could have shaved months off the development
time of the Israeli atomic bomb in the run-up to the Six Day War.
- In a letter this year to Sir Menzies Campbell, the Foreign Office
minister Kim Howells has quietly conceded Britain knew the heavy water
was going to Israel. He has yet to find time to tell the IAEA that, or
indeed to tell it about the plutonium or the uranium-235 or the
enriched lithium. Howells and his boss, Jack Straw, are too busy
telling the IAEA about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in another
corner of the Middle East.
- Meirion Jones produced Michael Crick's report for Newsnight
(BBC2) on the Israeli nuclear sales, which is broadcast on 9 March
- How we helped the French
- In May 1954 the French were fighting and losing their colonial
war against Ho Chi Minh's armies in Vietnam. At home they were slowly
establishing a nuclear infrastructure, but the setbacks in Indochina
convinced some that they needed the atomic bomb and they needed it
quickly.
- On 6 May, therefore, as the final battle at Dien Bien Phu neared
its climax, France's nuclear bosses sent a request to the chairman of
the British Atomic Energy Authority. It was a shopping list of items
that would help them build nuclear weapons, including a sample quantity
of plutonium "so we can take the steps preparatory to the utilisation
of our own plutonium". Britain knew about these things: it had exploded
its own bomb less than two years earlier.
- Before the letter even arrived the French had lost the battle and
the war. Later that year the French prime minister, Pierre Mendes
France, made the formal decision to build the atomic bomb. It took
another year to negotiate the deal, but in the end Britain agreed to
supply nuclear materials, including enriched uranium. Among the most
important parts of the agreement was an arrangement for the British to
check the blueprints and construction of French plutonium production
reactors.
- According to one source, this not only helped the French get
their military plutonium reactor at Marcoule into operation quickly but
it also averted a disaster, for the British found defects which could
have caused a catastrophic explosion at the Rhone Valley site. The same
source says that when Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1958 he
personally thanked Harold Macmillan for the team's work.
- There remained France's request for plutonium. In 1955 Britain
agreed to export ten grams but "we would not tell the US that we were
going to give the French plutonium nor about any similar cases". France
exploded its first atomic bomb in 1960.
_________________
C.
from Sheila Whitticks :
Date 31 May 2006
Subject: Edited extract from Failed
States, by Noam Chomsky.
Hi Francis,
You've probably already seen this but just in case you haven't here it
is.
Have a good day,
Sheila
NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN
Why it's over for America
by Noam Chomsky
[An inability to protect its citizens. The belief that it is above
the law. A lack of democracy. Three defining characteristics of the
'failed state'. And that, says Noam Chomsky, is exactly what the US is
becoming. In an exclusive extract from his devastating new book,
America's leading thinker explains how his country lost its way ]
05/30/06 "
The Independent" -- -- The selection of issues that should rank
high on the agenda of concern for human welfare and rights is,
naturally, a subjective matter. But there are a few choices that seem
unavoidable, because they bear so directly on the prospects for decent
survival. Among them are at least these three: nuclear war,
environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world's
leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these
catastrophes. It is important to stress the government, because the
population, not surprisingly, does not agree.
That brings up a fourth issue that should deeply concern Americans, and
the world: the sharp divide between public opinion and public policy,
one of the reasons for the fear, which cannot casually be put aside,
that, as Gar Alperowitz puts it in America Beyond Capitalism, "the
American 'system' as a whole is in real trouble - that it is heading in
a direction that spells the end of its historic values [of] equality,
liberty, and meaningful democracy".
The "system" is coming to have some of the features of failed states,
to adopt a currently fashionable notion that is conventionally applied
to states regarded as potential threats to our security (like Iraq) or
as needing our intervention to rescue the population from severe
internal threats (like Haiti). Though the concept is recognised to be,
according to the journal Foreign Affairs, "frustratingly imprecise",
some of the primary characteristics of failed states can be identified.
One is their inability or unwillingness to protect their citizens from
violence and perhaps even destruction. Another is their tendency to
regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law,
and hence free to carry out aggression and violence. And if they have
democratic forms, they suffer from a serious "democratic deficit" that
deprives their formal democratic institutions of real substance.
Among the hardest tasks that anyone can undertake, and one of the most
important, is to look honestly in the mirror. If we allow ourselves to
do so, we should have little difficulty in finding the characteristics
of "failed states" right at home.
No one familiar with history should be surprised that the growing
democratic deficit in the United States is accompanied by declaration
of messianic missions to bring democracy to a suffering world.
Declarations of noble intent by systems of power are rarely complete
fabrication, and the same is true in this case. Under some conditions,
forms of democracy are indeed acceptable. Abroad, as the leading
scholar-advocate of "democracy promotion" concludes, we find a "strong
line of continuity": democracy is acceptable if and only if it is
consistent with strategic and economic interests (Thomas Carothers). In
modified form, the doctrine holds at home as well.
The basic dilemma facing policymakers is sometimes candidly recognised
at the dovish liberal extreme of the spectrum, for example, by Robert
Pastor, President Carter's national security adviser for Latin America.
He explained why the administration had to support the murderous and
corrupt Somoza regime in Nicaragua, and, when that proved impossible,
to try at least to maintain the US-trained National Guard even as it
was massacring the population "with a brutality a nation usually
reserves for its enemy", killing some 40,000 people. The reason was the
familiar one: "The United States did not want to control Nicaragua or
the other nations of the region, but it also did not want developments
to get out of control. It wanted Nicaraguans to act independently,
except when doing so would affect US interests adversely."
Similar dilemmas faced Bush administration planners after their
invasion of Iraq. They want Iraqis "to act independently, except when
doing so would affect US interests adversely". Iraq must therefore be
sovereign and democratic, but within limits. It must somehow be
constructed as an obedient client state, much in the manner of the
traditional order in Central America. At a general level, the pattern
is familiar, reaching to the opposite extreme of institutional
structures. The Kremlin was able to maintain satellites that were run
by domestic political and military forces, with the iron fist poised.
Germany was able to do much the same in occupied Europe even while it
was at war, as did fascist Japan in Man-churia (its Manchukuo). Fascist
Italy achieved similar results in North Africa while carrying out
virtual genocide that in no way harmed its favourable image in the West
and possibly inspired Hitler. Traditional imperial and neocolonial
systems illustrate many variations on similar themes.
To achieve the traditional goals in Iraq has proven to be surprisingly
difficult, despite unusually favourable circumstances. The dilemma of
combining a measure of independence with firm control arose in a stark
form not long after the invasion, as mass non-violent resistance
compelled the invaders to accept far more Iraqi initiative than they
had anticipated. The outcome even evoked the nightmarish prospect of a
more or less democratic and sovereign Iraq taking its place in a loose
Shiite alliance comprising Iran, Shiite Iraq, and possibly the nearby
Shiite-dominated regions of Saudi Arabia, controlling most of the
world's oil and independent of Washington.
The situation could get worse. Iran might give up on hopes that Europe
could become independent of the United States, and turn eastward.
Highly relevant background is discussed by Selig Harrison, a leading
specialist on these topics. "The nuclear negotiations between Iran and
the European Union were based on a bargain that the EU, held back by
the US, has failed to honour," Harrison observes.
"The bargain was that Iran would suspend uranium enrichment, and the EU
would undertake security guarantees. The language of the joint
declaration was "unambiguous. 'A mutually acceptable agreement,' it
said, would not only provide 'objective guarantees' that Iran's nuclear
programme is 'exclusively for peaceful purposes' but would 'equally
provide firm commitments on security issues.'"
The phrase "security issues" is a thinly veiled reference to the
threats by the United States and Israel to bomb Iran, and preparations
to do so. The model regularly adduced is Israel's bombing of Iraq's
Osirak reactor in 1981, which appears to have initiated Saddam's
nuclear weapons programs, another demonstration that violence tends to
elicit violence. Any attempt to execute similar plans against Iran
could lead to immediate violence, as is surely understood in
Washington. During a visit to Tehran, the influential Shiite cleric
Muqtada al-Sadr warned that his militia would defend Iran in the case
of any attack, "one of the strongest signs yet", the Washington Post
reported, "that Iraq could become a battleground in any Western
conflict with Iran, raising the spectre of Iraqi Shiite militias - or
perhaps even the US-trained Shiite-dominated military - taking on
American troops here in sympathy with Iran." The Sadrist bloc, which
registered substantial gains in the December 2005 elections, may soon
become the most powerful single political force in Iraq. It is
consciously pursuing the model of other successful Islamist groups,
such as Hamas in Palestine, combining strong resistance to military
occupation with grassroots social organising and service to the poor.
Washington's unwillingness to allow regional security issues to be
considered is nothing new. It has also arisen repeatedly in the
confrontation with Iraq. In the background is the matter of Israeli
nuclear weapons, a topic that Washington bars from international
consideration. Beyond that lurks what Harrison rightly describes as
"the central problem facing the global non-proliferation regime": the
failure of the nuclear states to live up to their nuclear Non
Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligation "to phase out their own nuclear
weapons" - and, in Washington's case, formal rejection of the
obligation.
Unlike Europe, China refuses to be intimidated by Washington, a primary
reason for the growing fear of China on the part of US planners. Much
of Iran's oil already goes to China, and China is providing Iran with
weapons, presumably considered a deterrent to US threats. Still more
uncomfortable for Washington is the fact that, according to the
Financial Times, "the Sino-Saudi relationship has developed
dramatically", including Chinese military aid to Saudi Arabia and gas
exploration rights for China. By 2005, Saudi Arabia provided about 17
per cent of China's oil imports. Chinese and Saudi oil companies have
signed deals for drilling and construction of a huge refinery (with
Exxon Mobil as a partner). A January 2006 visit by Saudi king Abdullah
to Beijing was expected to lead to a Sino-Saudi memorandum of
understanding calling for "increased cooperation and investment between
the two countries in oil, natural gas, and minerals".
Indian analyst Aijaz Ahmad observes that Iran could "emerge as the
virtual linchpin in the making, over the next decade or so, of what
China and Russia have come to regard as an absolutely indispensable
Asian Energy Security Grid, for breaking Western control of the world's
energy supplies and securing the great industrial revolution of Asia".
South Korea and southeast Asian countries are likely to join, possibly
Japan as well. A crucial question is how India will react. It rejected
US pressures to withdraw from an oil pipeline deal with Iran. On the
other hand, India joined the United States and the EU in voting for an
anti-Iranian resolution at the IAEA, joining also in their hypocrisy,
since India rejects the NPT regime to which Iran, so far, appears to be
largely conforming. Ahmad reports that India may have secretly reversed
its stand under Iranian threats to terminate a $20bn gas deal.
Washington later warned India that its "nuclear deal with the US could
be ditched" if India did not go along with US demands, eliciting a
sharp rejoinder from the Indian foreign ministry and an evasive
tempering of the warning by the US embassy.
The prospect that Europe and Asia might move toward greater
independence has seriously troubled US planners since World War II, and
concerns have significantly increased as the tripolar order has
continued to evolve, along with new south-south interactions and
rapidly growing EU engagement with China.
US intelligence has projected that the United States, while controlling
Middle East oil for the traditional reasons, will itself rely mainly on
more stable Atlantic Basin resources (West Africa, western hemisphere).
Control of Middle East oil is now far from a sure thing, and these
expectations are also threatened by developments in the western
hemisphere, accelerated by Bush administration policies that have left
the United States remarkably isolated in the global arena. The Bush
administration has even succeeded in alienating Canada, an impressive
feat.
Canada's minister of natural resources said that within a few years one
quarter of the oil that Canada now sends to the United States may go to
China instead. In a further blow to Washington's energy policies, the
leading oil exporter in the hemisphere, Venezuela, has forged probably
the closest relations with China of any Latin American country, and is
planning to sell increasing amounts of oil to China as part of its
effort to reduce dependence on the openly hostile US government. Latin
America as a whole is increasing trade and other relations with China,
with some setbacks, but likely expansion, in particular for raw
materials exporters like Brazil and Chile.
Meanwhile, Cuba-Venezuela relations are becoming very close, each
relying on its comparative advantage. Venezuela is providing low-cost
oil while in return Cuba organises literacy and health programs,
sending thousands of highly skilled professionals, teachers, and
doctors, who work in the poorest and most neglected areas, as they do
elsewhere in the Third World. Cuba-Venezuela projects are extending to
the Caribbean countries, where Cuban doctors are providing healthcare
to thousands of people with Venezuelan funding. Operation Miracle, as
it is called, is described by Jamaica's ambassador to Cuba as "an
example of integration and south-south cooperation", and is generating
great enthusiasm among the poor majority. Cuban medical assistance is
also being welcomed elsewhere. One of the most horrendous tragedies of
recent years was the October 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. In addition
to the huge toll, unknown numbers of survivors have to face brutal
winter weather with little shelter, food, or medical assistance. One
has to turn to the South Asian press to read that "Cuba has provided
the largest contingent of doctors and paramedics to Pakistan", paying
all the costs (perhaps with Venezuelan funding), and that President
Musharraf expressed his "deep gratitude" for the "spirit and
compassion" of the Cuban medical teams.
Some analysts have suggested that Cuba and Venezuela might even unite,
a step towards further integration of Latin America in a bloc that is
more independent from the United States. Venezuela has joined Mercosur,
the South American customs union, a move described by Argentine
president Nestor Kirchner as "a milestone" in the development of this
trading bloc, and welcomed as opening "a new chapter in our
integration" by Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
Independent experts say that "adding Venezuela to the bloc furthers its
geopolitical vision of eventually spreading Mercosur to the rest of the
region".
At a meeting to mark Venezuela's entry into Mercosur, Venezuelan
president Hugo Chavez said, "We cannot allow this to be purely an
economic project, one for the elites and for the transnational
companies," a not very oblique reference to the US-sponsored "Free
Trade Agreement for the Americas", which has aroused strong public
opposition. Venezuela also supplied Argentina with fuel oil to help
stave off an energy crisis, and bought almost a third of Argentine debt
issued in 2005, one element of a region-wide effort to free the
countries from the control of the US-dominated IMF after two decades of
disastrous effects of conformity to its rules. The IMF has "acted
towards our country as a promoter and a vehicle of policies that caused
poverty and pain among the Argentine people", President Kirchner said
in announcing his decision to pay almost $1 trillion to rid itself of
the IMF forever. Radically violating IMF rules, Argentina enjoyed a
substantial recovery from the disaster left by IMF policies.
Steps toward independent regional integration advanced further with the
election of Evo Morales in Bolivia in December 2005, the first
president from the indigenous majority. Morales moved quickly to reach
energy accords with Venezuela.
Though Central America was largely disciplined by Reaganite violence
and terror, the rest of the hemisphere is falling out of control,
particularly from Venezuela to Argentina, which was the poster child of
the IMF and the Treasury Department until its economy collapsed under
the policies they imposed. Much of the region has left-centre
governments. The indigenous populations have become much more active
and influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, both major energy
producers, where they either want oil and gas to be domestically
controlled or, in some cases, oppose production altogether. Many
indigenous people apparently do not see any reason why their lives,
societies, and cultures should be disrupted or destroyed so that New
Yorkers can sit in SUVs in traffic gridlock. Some are even calling for
an "Indian nation" in South America. Meanwhile the economic integration
that is under way is reversing patterns that trace back to the Spanish
conquests, with Latin American elites and economies linked to the
imperial powers but not to one another. Along with growing south-south
interaction on a broader scale, these developments are strongly
influenced by popular organisations that are coming together in the
unprecedented international global justice movements, ludicrously
called "anti-globalisation" because they favour globalisation that
privileges the interests of people, not investors and financial
institutions. For many reasons, the system of US global dominance is
fragile, even apart from the damage inflicted by Bush planners.
One consequence is that the Bush administration's pursuit of the
traditional policies of deterring democracy faces new obstacles. It is
no longer as easy as before to resort to military coups and
international terrorism to overthrow democratically elected
governments, as Bush planners learnt ruefully in 2002 in Venezuela. The
"strong line of continuity" must be pursued in other ways, for the most
part. In Iraq, as we have seen, mass nonviolent resistance compelled
Washington and London to permit the elections they had sought to evade.
The subsequent effort to subvert the elections by providing substantial
advantages to the administration's favourite candidate, and expelling
the independent media, also failed. Washington faces further problems.
The Iraqi labor movement is making considerable progress despite the
opposition of the occupation authorities. The situation is rather like
Europe and Japan after World War II, when a primary goal of the United
States and United Kingdom was to undermine independent labour movements
- as at home, for similar reasons: organised labour contributes in
essential ways to functioning democracy with popular engagement. Many
of the measures adopted at that time - withholding food, supporting
fascist police - are no longer available. Nor is it possible today to
rely on the labour bureaucracy of the American Institute for Free Labor
Development to help undermine unions. Today, some American unions are
supporting Iraqi workers, just as they do in Colombia, where more union
activists are murdered than anywhere in the world. At least the unions
now receive support from the United Steelworkers of America and others,
while Washington continues to provide enormous funding for the
government, which bears a large part of the responsibility.
The problem of elections arose in Palestine much in the way it did in
Iraq. As already discussed, the Bush administration refused to permit
elections until the death of Yasser Arafat, aware that the wrong man
would win. After his death, the administration agreed to permit
elections, expecting the victory of its favoured Palestinian Authority
candidates. To promote this outcome, Washington resorted to much the
same modes of subversion as in Iraq, and often before. Washington used
the US Agency for International Development as an "invisible conduit"
in an effort to "increase the popularity of the Palestinian Authority
on the eve of crucial elections in which the governing party faces a
serious challenge from the radical Islamic group Hamas" (Washington
Post), spending almost $2m "on dozens of quick projects before
elections this week to bolster the governing Fatah faction's image with
voters" (New York Times). In the United States, or any Western country,
even a hint of such foreign interference would destroy a candidate, but
deeply rooted imperial mentality legitimates such routine measures
elsewhere. However, the attempt to subvert the elections again
resoundingly failed.
The US and Israeli governments now have to adjust to dealing somehow
with a radical Islamic party that approaches their traditional
rejectionist stance, though not entirely, at least if Hamas really does
mean to agree to an indefinite truce on the international border as its
leaders state. The US and Israel, in contrast, insist that Israel must
take over substantial parts of the West Bank (and the forgotten Golan
Heights). Hamas's refusal to accept Israel's "right to exist" mirrors
the refusal of Washington and Jerusalem to accept Palestine's "right to
exist" - a concept unknown in international affairs; Mexico accepts the
existence of the United States but not its abstract "right to exist" on
almost half of Mexico, acquired by conquest. Hamas's formal commitment
to "destroy Israel" places it on a par with the United States and
Israel, which vowed formally that there could be no "additional
Palestinian state" (in addition to Jordan) until they relaxed their
extreme rejectionist stand partially in the past few years, in the
manner already reviewed. Although Hamas has not said so, it would come
as no great surprise if Hamas were to agree that Jews may remain in
scattered areas in the present Israel, while Palestine constructs huge
settlement and infrastructure projects to take over the valuable land
and resources, effectively breaking Israel up into unviable cantons,
virtually separated from one another and from some small part of
Jerusalem where Jews would also be allowed to remain. And they might
agree to call the fragments "a state". If such proposals were made, we
would - rightly - regard them as virtually a reversion to Nazism, a
fact that might elicit some thoughts. If such proposals were made,
Hamas's position would be essentially like that of the United States
and Israel for the past five years, after they came to tolerate some
impoverished form of "statehood". It is fair to describe Hamas as
radical, extremist, and violent, and as a serious threat to peace and a
just political settlement. But the organisation is hardly alone in this
stance.
Elsewhere traditional means of undermining democracy have succeeded. In
Haiti, the Bush administration's favourite "democracy-building group,
the International Republican Institute", worked assiduously to promote
the opposition to President Aristide, helped by the withholding of
desperately needed aid on grounds that were dubious at best. When it
seemed that Aristide would probably win any genuine election,
Washington and the opposition chose to withdraw, a standard device to
discredit elections that are going to come out the wrong way: Nicaragua
in 1984 and Venezuela in December 2005 are examples that should be
familiar. Then followed a military coup, expulsion of the president,
and a reign of terror and violence vastly exceeding anything under the
elected government.
The persistence of the strong line of continuity to the present again
reveals that the United States is very much like other powerful states.
It pursues the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors of
the domestic population, to the accompaniment of rhetorical flourishes
about its dedication to the highest values. That is practically a
historical universal, and the reason why sensible people pay scant
attention to declarations of noble intent by leaders, or accolades by
their followers.
One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong,
but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that
charge: "They present solutions, but I don't like them." In addition to
the proposals that should be familiar about dealing with the crises
that reach to the level of survival, a few simple suggestions for the
United States have already been mentioned: 1) accept the jurisdiction
of the International Criminal Court and the World Court; 2) sign and
carry forward the Kyoto protocols; 3) let the UN take the lead in
international crises; 4) rely on diplomatic and economic measures
rather than military ones in confronting terror; 5) keep to the
traditional interpretation of the UN Charter; 6) give up the Security
Council veto and have "a decent respect for the opinion of mankind," as
the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centres
disagree; 7) cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase
social spending. For people who believe in democracy, these are very
conservative suggestions: they appear to be the opinions of the
majority of the US population, in most cases the overwhelming majority.
They are in radical opposition to public policy. To be sure, we cannot
be very confident about the state of public opinion on such matters
because of another feature of the democratic deficit: the topics
scarcely enter into public discussion and the basic facts are little
known. In a highly atomised society, the public is therefore largely
deprived of the opportunity to form considered opinions.
Another conservative suggestion is that facts, logic, and elementary
moral principles should matter. Those who take the trouble to adhere to
that suggestion will soon be led to abandon a good part of familiar
doctrine, though it is surely much easier to repeat self-serving
mantras. Such simple truths carry us some distance toward developing
more specific and detailed answers. More important, they open the way
to implement them, opportun- ities that are readily within our grasp if
we can free ourselves from the shackles of doctrine and imposed
illusion.
Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to seek to induce pessimism,
hopelessness, and despair, reality is different. There has been
substantial progress in the unending quest for justice and freedom in
recent years, leaving a legacy that can be carried forward from a
higher plane than before. Opportunities for education and organising
abound. As in the past, rights are not likely to be granted by
benevolent authorities, or won by intermittent actions - attending a
few demonstrations or pushing a lever in the personalised quadrennial
extravaganzas that are depicted as "democratic politics". As always in
the past, the tasks require dedicated day-by-day engagement to create -
in part recreate - the basis for a functioning democratic culture in
which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in
the political arena, from which it is largely excluded, but also in the
crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle. There
are many ways to promote democracy at home, carrying it to new
dimensions. Opportunities are ample, and failure to grasp them is
likely to have ominous repercussions: for the country, for the world,
and for future generations.
An edited extract from Failed
States, by Noam Chomsky (Hamish Hamilton)
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
____________
D.
from Frédéric MÉNI :
Subject : An update on the H. G. Wells piece.
Date: Wed, 31 May 2006
Dear Professor Feeley,
After looking at the Shape of Things to Come, according to H.G.
Wells, and after reading the references to Anthony Wilden in your
recent
bulletins, I discovered this piece of science fiction which refers to
Dr. Wilden's work and offers a rich bibliography on post-capitalist
research into society and nature.
I thought it might be of interest.
Yours truly,
Frédéric Méni
Marooned on Mars: Mind-spinning
books for software engineers
by William J. Clancey(*)
(*)Chief Scientist,
Human-Centered Computing
NASA/Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA 94035 (*)
On leave from the Institute for Human-Machine Cognition, University
of West Florida, Pensacola.
Automated Software Engineering Journal, published by Kluwer Academic
Publishers, Volume 7, 2000
I've just arrived on Mars, with 500 days before the next return
shuttle. Fortunately, we have email and internet access to Earth (the
line is fast, but there's a twenty minute delay on average, almost like
time-sharing in the 70s). My powerbook fits fine on my lap, but
slouching on the habitat's long couch, I prefer holding a book in my
hands, settling down with gleeful anticipation with a warm drink nearby
(it's -70c today). So I brought along an armload of books, some for
reference, some to read and study again, and others to share with the
next generation, as we build our colony. All are mind-spinning, just
what we need for opening a new world with new ways of thinking.
To start, I brought along Burrough's (1998)D ragonfly: NASA and the
Crisis Aboard MIR (New York: HarperCollins Publishers), the story of
the Russian-American misadventures on MIR. An expose with almost
embarrassing detail about the inner-workings of Johnson Space Center in
Houston, this book is best read with the JSC organization chart in hand.
Here's the real world of engineering and life in extreme environments.
It makes most other accounts of "requirements analysis" appear glib and
simplistic. The book vividly portrays the sometimes harrowing
experiences of the American astronauts in the web of Russian
interpersonal relations and literally in the web of MIR’s wiring.
Burrough’s
exposition reveals how handling bureaucratic procedures and bulky
facilities is as much a matter of moxie and goodwill as technical
capability. Lessons from MIR showed NASA that getting to Mars required
a different view of knowledge and improvisationlong-duration
missions are not at all like the scripted and pre-engineered flights of
Apollo or the Space Shuttle. Thanks to the efforts of the
Human-Centered Computing group at NASA/Ames, the days when engineers
separated power, dials, and ethernet ports on opposite sides of the
Space Station are past. Why, for our nine month voyage to Mars they
even designed the kitchen table to stay open all day! (On the Space
Station we had to stow it after every meal to get access to storage
below.)
Dragonfly shows the crazy antics of real-world operations; what's the
theoretical foundation for improving the design of complex systems?
Here I'm well-supplied. Though heavy (using half of my allotted
bookcase), I brought along Shapiro's (1992) multiple-volume
Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence. (New York: John Wiley and
Sons.)
The technical quality of this reference is unsurpassed. Whether you're
looking for details about Hidden Markov Models or hermeneutics, it's
here, with clarity, accuracy, and good citations. Although well-versed
on many of the topics, I find myself turning to this encyclopedia for
historical and technical details. With this book for reference, we've
created "intelligent" operations assistants in the Mars
habitatbuilt with agents and reusable inference enginesa far
cry from the monolithic computer system at
Houston's Mission Control, which was ported and changed piecemeal for
30 years (in the name of safety). Speaking of learning from the past,
I've also brought thAe CM Turing Award Lectures: The First Twenty Years
1966-1985(N ew York: The ACM Press). I came upon this volume when a
friend mentioned Hoare's lecture, "The Emperor's Old Clothes." Hoare
shares his stark experience: "The entire Elliott 503 Mark II software
project had to be abandoned...equivalent to one man's active working
life, and I was responsible, both as designer and manager, for wasting
it" (p. 150). Building on this experience, Hoare fervently appeals to
us not to allow ADA into the real world. Fortunately for me, NASA was
never much for programming fads, so we're not flying ADA on Mars.
Anyway, after I searched for Hoare's lecture on the web, I found a
collection of other Turing Award lectures and decided I wanted to read
and study them all. (I hope we'll soon get the next volume.) Now
although I'm an accomplished programmer (I'm using Visual Basic for
Applications to link the astrogeologists' datasheets and reports), my
professional role for the Mars base has gravitated to the philosophy of
engineering design. So the bulk of my Martian collection is more about
design as a creative process. Here's the core collection:
Alexander, C., et al. (1977). A pattern language. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Bamberger, J. (1991). The mind behind the musical ear . Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Schön, D. A. (1987).Educating the reflective practitioner San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Wilden, A. (1987). The rules are no game. New York: Routledge and Kegan
Raul.
These books are about the relation of artifacts, patterns,
descriptions, notations, designs, and the process of invention.
Paraphrasing
Schön, the topic is not how to build, but
what to build. Each teaches us about the relation of the mindhow
ideas form and are relatedand humanity's constructed environment.
They fundamentally help us understand the relation of individual
thoughts and social contexts and how change occurs on various
scaleswhether an incremental edit to a diagram, a reperceived and
reinterpreted rearrangement of parts, or a reciprocated move in a
social venture.
Alexander's book is about architectural patterns; yet really it
shows how grammar descriptions (or policies) do not strictly generate
the world of human artifacts and behavior, but serve as a kind of guide
or map. Alexander's ideas are as valuable for designing work places and
software tools, as courtyards and bedrooms. Ultimately, Alexander's
claim is epistemological: The knowledge of good design is embodied in
artifacts developed and improved in situ and can never be reduced to
written
principles or laws. There are two reasons for this: First, we can
always reinterpret past successes in new contexts to articulate new
heuristics, and second, the thoughts and actions that produced the
original artifacts were not themselves bounded by descriptive rules or
plans. Unfortunately, a subgroup of software engineering has taken up
the pattern language hammer by the wrong end of the handle: Instead of
viewing the pattern perspective as an analytic, requirements analysis
and evaluation technique (for explicating the context in which a tool
must operate), they have reduced the idea to more descriptions that
should be stored in a computer and used to generate I/O behavior. This
can lead to precisely the wrong resultconstraining work processes
to follow a designer’s predescribed workflow regulations. Instead we
should view the
patterns as improvised, situated arrangements (of facilities, deeds,
and materials) and inquire about the aspects of workplace design that
enable these patterns to develop. To apply Alexander properly, we need
to view workplace patterns as rules of thumb that reflect locally grown
relationships in tools and practices; nevertheless, as descriptions
they are of broad value for inspiring future work system design. For
example, could we develop a pattern language for computer network
design in
different kinds of collaborative workplaces, such that the
languagearticulates dimensions of size, risk, routine, and skills being
employed? (See Clancey, 1995b, 1997b.)
Developed in
the work of Bamberger and Schön, Alexander’s
ideas about emergent organization are manifest as the "situated
cognition" theory of knowledge and behavior. The upshot is that within
every human action, there is a non-descriptive component, that is, a
physical aspect that is not modeled and planned, but a neural level of
coordination that reactivates and adapts perceptual categories,
concepts, and motor actions. Now, that's a mouthful to be sure, but
Bamberger and Schön unfold these ideas carefully with a series of
simple examples from musicand art, showing the learner's perspective
(and how this contrasts with the teacher's terminology and curriculum).
(
Bamberger and
Schön don't really get to the
neural memory levelyou'll have to read my 1997 book to see the
relation.)
Dewey (1896) said all this long ago, but change is slow on
Earth. In important ways, computer science is partly responsible for
the retrograde epistemology of the 1960s and 70s. The metaphor (and
success) of the von Neumann architecture reified and reinforced ideas
about memory, knowledge, and learning thatas psychological
explanationswere outdated a century ago. The brain works in a
different way than today's conventional computers. The brain doesn't
execute programs in a literal
way, but reactivates perceptual-motor circuits "in line" and
generalizes them at the same time. The implications are profound for
software engineers (and especially AI specialists like myself). We
cannot identify how our tools work with people (e.g., "expert systems"
"knowledge bases"), and if we want to make progress in developing
computers with human intelligence, we need a different
memory-coordination mechanism (
Clancey, 1995a, 1999a). For
example, the simplest interpretation of
"knowledge management"a trendy notion in business software
todayis based on capturing, storing, and disseminating knowledge.
But this equates knowledge with databases and modelsa mistake that
Dewey said was like confusing a carpenter with his tools. Perhaps now
you can grasp
Wilden's title, "The rules are no game." By one
interpretation, the gamehow people perceive and conceive of their
actionsis different from the ruleswritten procedures of how
to behave. The map is not the territory. This ultimately only makes
sense from a human cognition standpoint when you realize how wrong the
storage metaphor of knowledge is. What's neat about
Wilden's book
is that he shows how these metaphors have played out in cinematic and
social-political settings. Perhaps the antagonism of conservative to
liberal political parties has its origins in hierarchical neural
processes by which conceptual systems develop: Assimilation
(highlighting of general values) and differentiation (highlighting of
diversity). These ways of relating ideas may develop in individuals as
mental styles and thus different strategies for reconciling social
problems. Such a philosophical analysis only makes sense when you
realize that concepts in the human brain are not networks of word
definitions, so again "knowledge" and "reasoning" involve real-time
adaptive capabilities in people that the present-day computer
architectures do not replicate. In particular, the idea of user models
has been hampered by shortcomings in the theory of how individuals
differ cognitively. On the one hand, non-verbal aspects of cognition
are not adequately related to perception and language; and on the other
hand, differences of knowledge are reduced to variations in descriptive
models.
Wilden's work is challenging because he starts with
people and real-world experience, rather than tidy theories. Indeed,
enough theory! Back to building a Martian colony. I brought along two
books to round out my collection. The firstD, esign at Work:
Cooperative Design of Computer Systems (edited by Greenbaum, J., &
Kyng, M., Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991) is an
experimental handbook, telling the story of a group of social and
cognitive scientists who put their (sometimes rhetoric-heavy) ideas to
practice. My favorite chapter is
Wynn's "Taking practice
seriously."
I smile every time I visualize her account of workflow diagrams,
"There are people helping this block to be what it needs to beto
name it, put it under a heading where it will be seen as a recognizable
variant, deciding whether to leave it in or take it out, whom to convey
it to" (pp. 56–57). When you impose programmatic processes on people,
you might make a mess of the workplace.
Bannon's "From social
factors to social actors" is equally provocative and
mind-spinning. In fact it's all here, from interface
design to video interaction analysis, to scenario-based prototyping.
Other books tell the story and other projects do it better, but as a
primer on how to design software so it fits human purposes, this is the
one I brought to reread and exploit.
Actually, with this collection so far, I’ve come full circle: These are
the books that inspired our design of the Mars Arctic Research Station,
an analog experiment on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic (M.A.R.S.,
1999). In this extreme setting, we studied scientists and engineers
investigating a Mars-like impact crater. We established a baseline for
their practices; then following the principles of design in the context
of use and in situ evaluation, we prototyped tools that would
facilitate life and work
on Mars (Clancey, in press). For instance, what tools are required to
log and analyze rock samples in the field, and indeed to write journal
papers before returning home? We showed that the Internet, which
provided direct access to colleagues and the public, radically changed
the role of “Mission Control” back on Earth.
My last book,
Petroski's (1985) "To engineer is human: The role of
failure in successful design" (New York: St. Martin's Press) has
already been mentioned by two fellow Desert Island readers (Dobson,
1996; Ryan, 1996). But in developing software for space exploration and
dealing with the many disasters that will face us on Mars, I want every
colonist to read this book. Basically, the book is aboutp erspective,
and provides a hopeful way of coping with inevitable setbacks. Somehow
our society has
developed an aversion to failure, making it an indicator of
incapability, rather than a stepping stone. For example, NASA's
unofficial calculations predict that of an initial crew of six going to
Mars, only five will survive to return. Society needs to be ready for
that outcome. Somehow it's not enough to remind people of the countless
ships and men who were lost in exploration just a few score years ago
in searching for the Northwest Passage (Lopez, 1986). Somehow we have
the idea that things are different now; we have perfected our methods,
so mechanical parts andsoftware never fail. But then when they do, of
course, we knock ourselves down, and think less of our society. Maybe
this stems from a lack of external threat that would rally us to new
efforts. Indeed, that's one reason why I jumped at the chance to go to
Mars. Only really difficult challenges, where losses are inevitable,
will reveal how limited our capabilities really are. Whether it's
building rockets or robots, we have just begun.
It's a scary place here on Mars. One false move and I'm dead. A hundred
steps from the base, I'm in a cold, empty world. All our designs, our
automated systems, and our social ideas are young and forming, tenuous,
yet growing. Most of the prevalent theory about knowledge and memory on
which we build software tools for people is primitive and misleading.
And our computer architectures are just making the first steps to
selforganizing, "in place" circuitry. That's the critical and yet
hopeful
attitude I want the next generation of software engineers to
understand. Computer science has just begun.
Additional References
Clancey, W. J. (1995a). AI: Inventing a New Kind of MachineA. CM
Computing Surveys, 27(3), 320-322.
Clancey, W. J. (1995b). Practice cannot be reduced to theory:
Knowledge, representations, and change in the workplace. In S. Bagnara
& C. Zuccermaglio & S. Stucky (Eds.),O rganizational Learning
and Technological Change (pp. 16-46). Berlin: Springer. (Papers from
the NATO Workshop, Siena, Italy, September 22-26, 1992.)
Clancey, W. J. (1997a). Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and
Computer Representations. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Clancey, W. J. (1997b). The conceptual nature of knowledge, situations,
and activity. In P. Feltovich & R. Hoffman & K. Ford
(Eds.)Human and Machine Expertise in Context (pp. 247–291). Menlo Park,
CA: The AAAI Press.
Clancey, W. J. (1999a). Conceptual Coordination: How the Mind Orders
Experience in Time. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Clancey, W. J. (in press). Human exploration ethnography: The
Haughton-Mars Project 1998-1999. Proceedings of the Second Annual
Meeting of the Mars Society. Boulder, CO.
Dewey, J. ([1896] 1981). The reflex arc concept in psychology.
Psychological Review, III (July), 357-370. (Reprinted in J.J. McDermott
(ed.), The Philosophy of John Dewey, Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 136-148.)
Dobson, J. (1996). Desert Island ColumnA. utomated Software Engineering
Journal, vol. 3, no. 1/2 June.
Lopez, B. (1986). Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern
Landscape. New York: Bantam Books.
M.A.R.S. (1999). The Mars Arctic Research Station.
http://www.marssociety.org.
Ryan, K. (1996). Desert Island ColumnA. utomated Software Engineering
Journal, vol. 3, no. 3/4, August, pps. 391-393.
Zubrin, R. and Wagner, R. (1996). The Case for Mars. The Plan to Settle
the Red Planet and Why We Must. New York: Free Press.
____________
E.
from Truthout :
Date : 28 May 2006
Subject :
Santa
Cruz Sentinel
Pentagon Ordered to Expedite
Handover of UC Spying Records
by Roger Sideman
Trying to learn more about reports of military spying at UC Santa Cruz
last year, campus group Students Against War scored a victory this week
when a federal judge ordered the Department of Defense to expedite a
public-records request made by the group.
In January, Students Against War asked the Pentagon
to disclose whether it spied on San Francisco Bay Area student
organizations, and release any information gathered on the
organizations.
U.S. 9th District Court Judge William Alsup ruled
Thursday that such information is "of significant importance to public
policy and public protest," impelling the Department of Defense to act
more quickly on the student request.
Students said they were pleased with the decision.
"We're happy because it shows that being spied on
has to be taken seriously," said Students Against War member Kot
Hordynski, who sat in on Thursday's hourlong hearing in San Francisco.
Hordynski said lawyers told him the Pentagon records, public under the
Freedom of Information Act, could be handed over within three months.
A lawsuit filed in March by the Northern California
chapter of the ACLU, on behalf of Students Against War and a UC
Berkeley anti-war group, asked the Department of Defense to promptly
disclose information from an obscure Pentagon agency that included
reports on protests and other peaceful civilian demonstrations in a
database meant to detect terrorist activities.
Among the incidents researched and described as a
threat to U.S. security was an April 2005 protest against military
recruiters at a UCSC job fair. The noisy sit-in temporarily shut down
the job fair and resulted in the departure of the recruiters whose
presence triggered the protest.
The database, which a Pentagon fact sheet says is
meant to capture information "indicative of possible terrorist
pre-attack activity," came to light in December when NBC News obtained
details on its contents.
To support the student request for expediting the
information, ACLU attorneys submitted several news stories to the
Department of Defense, including an article from the Sentinel, to show
the media has "a compelling need for information" to inform the public
about alleged spy programs.
The Department of Defense rejected a student request
for expedited records on Feb. 13, just two days after it deleted
mention of the Students Against War protest from its database at the
request of Chancellor Denice Denton. The department's explanation
stated that additional information was not worthy of "breaking news"
and therefore there is no legal obligation to rush the process.
"The public has a right to know the extent to which
the Defense Department is spying on political protest," said attorney
Amitai Schwartz, who argued the case for ACLU. "The court moved us one
step closer to finding out the facts about what really happened."
A Department of Defense representative would not
comment on the decision Friday.
__________________
F.
from Monty Kroopkin :
Date 28 May 2006
Subject: Stanley Aronowitz: "From the New Deal to the New Left"
Francis, I would be very interested to see
your response.
--Monty
******************************
Stanley,
It has been a very long time since we have been in touch, and I hope
you are well. A friend sent me a copy of your piece "From the New Deal
to the New Left". I might title my comment "From the First
International to the World Social Forum". I concur that the subject of
organization (and for what) is more urgent today than ever before.
It is also high time we again examine the theory of the state, the
question of contesting for state power, and the objective of a global
stateless society. The anarcho-syndicalist and libertarian communist
positions on these issues need to be part of any serious discussion
about political parties. I am not suggesting an either/or regarding
party versus none. Rather, more thinking about the state of the state
in the globalization process, and the implications for organization, as
well as the problems and dangers of state power.
I put a high priority on union work, but I also vote and participate to
some extent in the activity of electoral parties, not out of any
delusion about bourgeois democracy, nor out of support for a goal of
achieving state power, but because the monopolization of corporate
control of major news media leaves little open space for mass
communication of our alternative messages. Political parties can still
break through that monopoly censor barrier, to a small extent, and in
addition, the national culture still embraces door-to-door
conversations conducted by political candidates and parties, whereas,
canvassing door-to-door outside of an election campaign is much less
warmly accepted. The Internet is a hugely important tool for reaching
mass audiences and for one-to-one communication akin to door-to-door
work, but it is not enough, and not certain it will remain accessible.
Political parties can have a vital role in mass education and in
organizing, and can help to achieve significant reforms to alleviate
suffering and increase degrees of justice, but I submit that unless the
organizing is aiming at formation of a global union capable of
replacing and displacing both state power and capitalism, then we will
be not only misleading everyone, but setting our sights too low and
risking the loss of support when only small gains are won.
Along with the question of a new party, we need to engage a serious
discussion about the need for a new global union of workers. The
national level of organization is archaic.
Yours in solidarity from my NSA party line,
Monty Reed Kroopkin
San Diego, Californias
*****************************
-- I received a forwarded copy of:
Stanley Aronowitz
Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination
Vol. 1, No. 2 2006
From The New Deal To The New Left
by Stanley Aronowitz
THE UNITED STATES is the only nation in the "advanced" capitalist world
without a significant left party. Although labor and
socialist/communist parties have
long existed at the local level-- many cities had workingmen's parties;
the Socialist Party made important electoral inroads at the turn of the
20th century; and the Communists were key organizers of the mass
industrial union and other social movements in the 1930s and 1940s--in
general Americans have been tied to the two-party system. The question
is whether the absence of a left political formation of significant
influence and constituency is a function of "American
Exceptionalism"--as was first argued by the German sociologist, Werner
Sombart whose book "Why is there No Socialism in the United States?"
first appeared in1906, when the Socialists were in a phase of
rapid growth--or whether far more concrete, "subjective" influences
have prevented the sustenance of a left party of national influence.
Sombart's essential
argument is that in the absence of a feudal tradition class
consciousness was never formed; in other words historical materialism
applies only to Europe. America's artisan and yeoman past, which
constituted a sustaining myth of individualism; its surfeit of natural
resources, which permit cheap energy and cheap food; its mobility
opportunities, which parallel Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier
thesis; its populist urban political machines, which absorbed class
discontent; and its ethnically diverse working class all constituted
unbreachable obstacles to class solidarity. With two major exceptions--
the Progressive Party presidential campaign of 1948, and the Green
Party's 2000 campaign in behalf of Ralph Nader--by the end of World War
II progressives and many radicals had been swept up in Franklin D.
Roosevelt's New Deal
Coalition or had conceded that radicalism was incapable of attracting a
popular constituency.
We saw the consequences of the absence of a coherent and forceful Left
in the 2004 presidential election, when most on the left and the
center-left rallied behind a centrist Democratic candidate while the
third party forces were hopelessly divided. Leaving aside the
historical left abdication of the space of the opposition to the
Democrats, the fact is the Democrats do not occupy that space, except
in electoral terms. Their campaign was bereft of sharply defined
issues: they neither defended their social liberalism nor mounted an
attack against the Bush administration's war and economic policies,
which have been directed against the working class, and they barely
mentioned the Bush betrayal of the environment or challenged his claim
that the U.S. economy was on the mend.
The Left was led by the nose by the de facto American liberal party,
which emerged as a serious political force during the primary season
when former Vermont governor Howard Dean came out of nowhere to
challenge the party establishment with his mild anti-Iraq War position
and a grass-roots fund-raising campaign that helped energize a
citizens' movement at the local level. The demise of Dean's
presidential candidacy was not nearly as important as his legacy: the
creation of a new middle class liberal movement that has taken the
novel form of Internet communication both through a series of webzines
(to add to the hard copy journals of opinion such as The Nation and The
Progressive) and through issues organizing by MoveOn.org, which has
shown phenomenal ability to assemble a mass online constituency that
can be mobilized to write letters, visit legislators, and give money to
promising electoral campaigns. But in the end they supported the
centrist John Kerry, whose major domestic plank was to
offer tax breaks for employers who created jobs for the unemployed and
who criticized Bush for not sending enough troops to get the job done
in Iraq.
In order to explain this state of affairs, we must briefly address the
historical choices that led large sections of the Left to abdicate the
position of opposition. For the sad situations of the last two decades
that produced liberal hegemony over what was once a promising radical
movement were the outcome of a long process that can be traced to two
signal events that shaped the American Left: the admission by Nikita
Khrushchev that the "crimes" of Stalin against the peasantry, a large
cohort of old Bolsheviks, and countless others marked the twenty five
years of his undisputed rule; and the Left's response to the rise of
fascism during the 1930s and 1940s, when most of its organizations
suspended the class struggle, chose to give qualified support to
liberal capitalism, and consequently subordinated itself to the
Democratic
party. Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that the question of
political organization was relegated to the back burner.
Since the 1960s, United States Left has, with few exceptions, accepted
the view that the question of political organization was resolved by
the collapse of communism initiated quite unintentionally by
Khrushchev's revelations at the 1956 20th Soviet Party Congress of the
repressive and sometimes terroristic character of Stalin's rule. Among
its features was the moral and political corruption of the Bolshevik
project, especially the vision of a society in which workers, peasants,
and other exploited strata would, through popularly elected councils,
manage all of the crucial economic and social functions. Particularly
loathsome were the details surrounding the Moscow
Trials of 1936-1937, where the cream of the old Bolshevik
revolutionaries were wiped out by a "legal" process that offered little
room for defense, let alone dissent. Equally abhorrent was the
knowledge of the formation of a new class of party apparatchiks and
state bureaucrats who enjoyed a monopoly of power and material
privilege. Far from a force for pointing the way to a more egalitarian
future, the Communist Party became, itself, a new ruling class. These
revelations drove thousands of dedicated communists from the American
party after 1956, which, after a prolonged debate, remained staunchly
apologetic for the Soviet oligarchy; more, the stain carried over to
succeeding generations of young leftists for whom the concept of
"party" was itself an epithet. Even as private property in the
ownership of the means of material production was largely abolished,
state "socialism" brought neither freedom nor prosperity to the mass of
Soviet citizens. But the immense authority of the Soviet Union
on the Left--especially during the 1930s when its economic achievements
were heralded as proof of the superiority of socialism over capitalism
and the 1940s, when the Red Army vanquished the mighty Nazi war machine
at Stalingrad--became a nightmare for millions of dedicated radicals
and revolutionaries whose faith was shattered by the truths they had
vehemently denied, or for which they had offered apologies for decades.
The aftermath was not only mass resignations from many of the parties
of the West, including the United States and the UK, but a slow but
steady deterioration in the entire socialist project.
The end of "really existing" socialism triggered a tidal wave of
criticism, confusion and recriminations that resulted in the stunning
decline of once powerful mass Communist parties of Italy and France.
The crumbling Soviet Empire prompted the Italian party to change its
name to the Democratic Party of the Left, which preserved some of its
electoral appeal but signaled a radical loss of confidence in its own
heritage and vision. Soon after the name change, a new formation arose,
the Rifondazione group that sought to retain the revolutionary aims of
the historical Italian Communist Party. After 1991, the less flexible
French party rapidly lost most of its electoral constituency and some
of its trade union hegemony and, equally important, ceased to be a
magnet for a considerable fraction of the intellectuals whose cultural
and
ideological role in French society remains to this day important. What
saved these parties from virtual extinction was their longheld ironic
attitude towards the Soviet Union and its supplicants.
This was not the case with the American party and its once-substantial
periphery. Although it had sustained losses during the bleak first half
of the 1950s, especially among its leading trade unionists (who were
prohibited by law from holding union office if they were open
Communists), Khrushchev's speech proved utterly devastating to its
member rolls and to the remnants of its influence. The key reason was
the fact that since the party's inception in 1919, the American
Communists were true believers. Particularly damaging to its survival,
even in a weakened state, was the slavish subordination of much of the
leadership to the Soviet party which itself can be explained by, on the
one hand, the strong representation of fiercely pro-Soviet immigrant
and first generation Eastern Europeans within the party, and on the
other by the almost complete lack of cultural and political
circumspection within its ranks. The latter feature is a symptom of the
degree to which American Communism was truly American: puritanical,
humorless--for example it lacked the capacity for self-mockery--and
selfabnegating when it comes to matters of religion and other forms of
authority. For the party core, which was mostly bereft of theoretical
and historical perspective, Marxism andCommunism were the twin pillars
of their religion. Their fervent profession of Marxism scarcely hid the
bald fact that few Communists enjoyed even a superficial mastery of
Marx's critique of political economy, let alone the materialist
conception of
history. Instead, many party faithful were imbued with Stalinist
dogmatism culled from a few texts. And Stalin himself was elevated by
the official line to the status of a demigod, which made it all the
more difficult to change the party's course, especially when the
authority of the Soviet party was being severely tested and its leading
figures had no time for the troubled Americans. After several years of
debate, two thirds of its membership left the party and its influence
was reduced to a whisper.
Other parties of the Left were similarly enfeebled. The two main
Trotskyist formations--the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the
Independent Socialist League (ISL)--had suffered government attacks but
mainly lost ground for two distinct reasons: the CP, whose relative
strength once gave them a reason for being and sustained their
opposition, was in shambles; and, like other socialists, many of its
activists, especially of the ISL, became trade union and liberal
functionaries, positions which drove them to silence, or worse,
collaboration with the prevailing cold-war, liberal consensus. Others
were pleased to find academic jobs, positions that had been either
denied them by McCarthy -like university policies or by party
discipline. Although the SWP experienced a brief revival during the
anti- Vietnam War movement, managing to attract some young
intellectuals and soldiers, it was unable to overcome the general
decline of the Left or its own lack of any but tactical imagination.
Questions of political organization typically occupy social movements
and political formations during periods of popular upsurge. The New
Left which, in 1960, arose in the ideological vacuum produced by its
ancestors-- many were "red diaper" babies imbued with their parents'
will to change the world but not necessarily sympathetic to their
way--were, in the zenith of their influence, obsessed with the question
of what to do in the wake of the spread of the movement beyond the
universities, to professions such as medicine, social work, and
teaching and even into the ranks of young workers and members of the
armed forces.Their decision not to form a new "party" of the left,
or even to build a national movement for a "democratic society"
parallel to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)--arguably the
leading formation of the New Left--
was fateful for the future development of American radicalism for it
was the first time since the 1930s that the Left had a popular base.
Wini Breines has demonstrated that attempts to build a permanent
organization failed was not the result of a mood drift but the outcome
of a quite deliberate decision. The main voices of the New Left,
including the leadership of the mass anti-Vietnam War movement,
were convinced that party formations would inhibit the mass character
of the movement, lead to bureaucratization and worse, to the inevitable
integration of the movement into the liberal mainstream. These views
were fueled by the prevailing libertarian sentiment among many sections
of the movement which disdained ideas such as party discipline and
centralization, but also were conditioned by the tawdry history of
international
communism. Since the Cold War was the ineluctable context for politics,
the words of C. Wright Mills rang in the ears of many. In his
influential Letter to the New Left, Mills left little room for doubt:
do not become entangled in the "Russian Question" but build a movement
directed to American society and particularly its politics and culture.
(1)
And these arguments were tinged by more than a small dose of
participatory democratic concepts, according to which power must reside
in the "people" rather than in
tightly organized party elites composed chiefly of middleclass
intellectuals. In SDS, "participatory democracy" stood in not only for
a healthy affirmation of a politics that required the direct
participation of the people "in the decisions that affect(ed) their
lives," but also for a populist, even anarchist suspicion of a
political center that might haveinfluence over the movement. These
ideas were mixed in with a heavy dose of anti-intellectualism that
permeated the later SDS.
(2)
Of course, not every fraction of the Left was imbued with
antipathy towards the concept of a revolutionary or radical party. For
a brief moment the organizational question dominated conversations in
the New Left and its leading organization, SDS. The debate was fomented
by one of the sects, Progressive Labor (PL), a self-proclaimed Maoist
organization founded in 1960 by a small group which had split from the
Communist Party, accusing it of "revisionism," a term that connoted
deviation from revolutionary politics. In its search for a wider
political base, since 1966 PL had made SDS a special concentration.
While most SDS leaders rejected PL itself as an organizational
alternative to the relatively loose SDS structure, many were attracted
to its argument that without a party to lead and unify the opposition
to capitalism and imperialism, the movement would inevitably ebb and
perhaps disappear.
Why was PL able to refocus the organization's attention away from its
preoccupation with the Vietnam War towards a season of introspection?
One factor was the enormous prestige of North Vietnam and the National
Liberation Front, its South Vietnam affiliate. Several leading New Left
figures, including SDS founder Tom
Hayden and Staughton Lynd, had visited Vietnam and returned with
glowing reports about the anti- imperialist resistance and were
impressed by its Communist leadership. The main debate within SDS in
1968 and 1969 was whether the organization should transform itself into
a vanguard Marxist-Leninist party, or a revolutionary party directed to
youth and blacks, or a "movement for a democratic society" which could
carry the program of participatory democracy into the unions, community
organizing, and the professions but which would maintain a
decentralized structure. For anyone who would listen, Murray Bookchin's
passionate pamphlet, Listen Marxist!, written in the heat of the
controversy, provided readers with a grim reminder of the legacy of the
Marxist-Leninist left, not only in the United States but in Spain and
Russia itself. Bookchin suggested that the anarchist organizational
form, the federation of independent groups which retained their
autonomy, was most appropriate to a political formation that respected
the tenets of participatory democracy. Bookchin reflected the viewpoint
of a number of the relevant discussants but in the cauldron of
ideological fire was largely
ignored.
The breakup of SDS in 1970 was both a symptom of, and a tremendous
force in, the collapse of the New Left. Excepting feminist and ecology
movements which had yet
to peak, other movements were clearly in trouble. Massive
demonstrations against the war may have forced a president from office,
but the new administration of Richard Nixon had responded to certain
defeat on the battlefield by widening the war. The killings of antiwar
student protesters at Kent State in 1970 were a severe warning that the
Nixon administration was in no mood for tolerance, even of whites. When
Nixon, in the wake of massive resistance by draftees and objectors,
abolished the draft, the protests were visibly weakened. And the
black freedom movement, whose civil rights wing was already co-opted by
the legalistic hopes surrounding the Voting and Civil Rights Acts, was
further disarmed when, after Martin Luther King's assassination, it
failed to address the long festering deterioration of black living
standards due to the
effects of de-industrialization of most major northern cities, the
already evident abject failure of Brown vs. Board of Education to
remedy de facto discrimination in
schools, and the obdurate refusal of organized labor to address its own
racism. In the nadir of the mass street expressions of the movements
after 1973, various
formations scrambled to preserve what they had already achieved and,
fearing that efforts to build a coherent ideological and political left
would anger their potential allies at a moment of advancing
conservatism, tended to build coalitions with elements of the
Democratic party. Thus, after a nanosecond's flirtation with third
party electoral politics and something more than a flirtation with
Leninist vanguardism, since the 1980s the main tendency of the Left has
been to revert to single-issue politics represented, for example, by
the current anti-Iraq War coalitions, by local level struggles such as
fights against urban redevelopment, or by social movements such as the
black freedom movement and feminism, which are on the defensive in the
wake of right-wing assaults on their achievements of the 1955-1975
period.
It may be superfluous to remark that mass demonstrations against what
has become an unpopular Iraq War, the impatience of large sections of
Americans with the Bush administration's drift toward barbarism, the
looming economic crisis, including gas inflation, the Bush
administration's palpable incompetence and class/race bias during the
Hurricane Katrina debacle, the impending bursting of the housing bubble
that has made even the most blinky-eyed neo-liberals nervous, and the
absolute paralysis of the center- right Democratic party, which seems
unable to remember what political opposition is, have yet to inspire
the Left to seek a voice that may spur a new wave of opposition that
would clearly articulate a series of alternatives and begin a
discussion of what a new society might look like. With social movements
at or near a standstill,
and organized labor in decline and seriously divided, the problem of
building a new Left and particularly its organizational aspects may
appear merely an academic,
even utopian, exercise. On the contrary, I want to suggest that these
questions take on urgency today precisely because the so-called
"objective conditions" are ripe. If they have a utopian dimension, it
is no more accidental than any proposal for fundamental structural
change in the present political environment, when most radicals find
themselves constrained to fight for something less than increments.
By objective conditions, I do not mean to repeat the mechanistic
formulae of the old Left: economic crisis, war, and a certain degree of
disarray among sections of the ruling class. Among these conditions are
what in the traditional rhetoric one might term "subjective" --that is,
the effects of the interventions of specific groups and individuals:
the considerable evidence of popular disaffection from the war and
renewed activity, exemplified by Cindi Sheehan's dramatic and
media-savvy summer 2005 encampment at Bush's ranch and the astonishing
outpouring of support, despite Times columnist Frank Rich's rue that
"slick left-wing operatives" had succeeded in making her protest into a
"circus"; the open, unprecedented acknowledgement among labor leaders
and their intellectual acolytes that the unions are in crisis, even if
their solutions are largely administrative; growing recognition in wide
circles of the black freedom movement that the legal framework of civil
rights established since Brown and
the Voting Rights legislation do not equality or even freedom make. In
fact, in the aftermath of Katrina some agree with New York Congress
member Charles Rangel that
federal neglect was a reminder that some conditions have changed little
in the past forty years. And, miracles of miracles, some journalists
have discovered that class plays an important role in American politics
and culture.
---------------------
(1) C. Wright Mills, "The New Left" in
Power,
Politics, and People, ed. Irving Louis Horowitz (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1963); Wini Breines,
Community and
Organization in the New Left (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and
Garvey, 1982).
(2) The irony of the populist anti-intellectualism of the
New Left is that many of its protagonists were themselves trained
intellectuals. Anti-intellectualism outlived its initial populist
moment; it pervades the so-called "activist" Left to this day.
*********************
Francis McCollum Feeley
Professor of American Studies/
Director of Research
Université de Grenoble-3
Grenoble, France
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/