Bulletin
N° 635
Subject: ON THE POLITICS OF
SCIENCE AND THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS: A SHORT HISTORY OF THE PRODUCTION AND
DISTRIBUTION OF KNOWLEDGE, GOODS AND SERVICES . . . .
21 November 2014
Grenoble, France
Dear
Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
The
history of the science of psychoanalysis was much more than the sectarian
disputes within the IPA in Vienna, Berlin and Switzerland, between for
instance Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud. To gain a wider
perspective we must travel east of Vienna to Saint Petersburg, to the north-west coast of the Russian
Empire and on to China. A world-famous contemporary of Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939) was Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936); it was in Saint Petersburg that he
developed the scientific theory of the higher nervous system which would challenge the authority of Freudian theories for generations to
come.
Like
Freud, Pavlov enjoyed a long career and survived, and even prospered, through
the transition from Tsarist Russia to Soviet Russia and Stalinism. His international
reputation gave him special status, and in 1923, in a typically out-spoken
manner, he wrote Lenin that the ‘soviet experiment in Russia was not worth the
hind leg of a frog’. In the 1930s he wrote Stalin several times asking for the release of prominent Russian scientists who had been
detained for their political deviations. Pavlov, however, remained untouched
and continued to receive funding for his original work in the field of
physiology.
We
will look at the contributions of this great Russian
academic from the perspective of the history of the study of psychology in
China, as written by MIT researchers, Robert and Ai-il
Chin, in their book, Psychological Research
in Communist China, 1949-1966 (MIT Press, 1969).
Ivan
Pavlov, writes the Chin couple, was, also,
unencumbered by the traditional western split between mind and body. This
dualism embedded in idealist methodology did not appear in Pavlovian
theory. “There was no concern about the question of physiological bases versus the psychological and social
bases of the mind. … Pavlov had already solved it by grounding learning and
thought processes in the physiological functioning of the organism.”(p.10)
Pavlov
considered his major work on the conditioned reflex to belong to neurology and
physiology, defining his proper concern as problems of sensation and perception
and the origin of consciousness. In fact, he dissociated himself from
psychology for most of his life. During the three years before his death in
1936, he became interested in verbal behavior and the function of
consciousness. These activities of the higher nervous system he called the second
signal system. The second signal system . . . refers to those reflexes in man that respond
to verbal stimuli; it is specific to man and is distinguished from the first
signal system by the capabilities of abstraction and generalization. This
concept enabled Pavlovian physiology to be linked up
with psychology, for the physiological process of nervous excitation and
inhibition could be applied to mental activity involving language.
Nevertheless, psychology in the Soviet Union was never revamped completely into
Pavlovian schemes; and certainly, by the late
fifties, a good deal of work there went beyond Pavlov’s original position and
interest.(p.11)
The
Pavlovian School of psychology, which would extend to
China after 1949, grew to disdain the ‘bourgeois introspection’ of Freudian
psychology, based as it was “on the physiological reaction to the manifestation
of mysterious sexual drives.”(from the Chinese Journal of Neuropsychiatry, No.4
(1956), pp.322-325, cited by Robert & Ai-il Chin
in Psychological Research in Communist
China, 1949-1966 (1969), p.63.)
The
psychology being attacked was the ‘bourgeois’ Western approach based on
‘idealism’ –more specifically, the schools of behaviorism, gestaltism,
and psychoanalysis.(p.49)
Psychotherapy,
which did not win immediate acceptance, gained respectability [in the USSR in
the early 1950s] when the theoretical justification was presented in terms of
Pavlov’s second signal system –that is, psychotherapy was then viewed as
a form of manipulating behavior change through language in place of other
external stimuli.(p.64)
Before
the Revolution, Chinese psychology was influenced by the Confucian tradition,
but increasingly American schools of psychology entered the realm. It was
during the intellectual and social ferment of the post-World War I period that
western psychology was introduced to Chinese universities. The
works of John Dewy (1859-1952) and of his mentor, William James (1842-1910),
attracted great national attention “as a means of language reform for the
modernization of China.” Psychologists focused on how
one learns and, in particular, how language is learned. Great hopes were
pinned on psychology as a science, providing knowledge necessary to solve the
perplexing problems of modernization.
In a
general sense, it could be said that John Dewey created psychology in China
through his works, his students, and his personal presence. Dewey was lecturing
in China on and off for two years in 1919-1920. Coming at the height of the
intellectual revolution that was to encompass every aspect of China’s cultural
life, Dewey’s ideas in philosophy and psychology were promulgated with great
enthusiasm. Indeed, T’sai Yuan-p’ei,
Chancellor of Peking University, introduced Dewey to a Chinese audience in 1918
as a thinker greater than Confucius. The majority of the early Chinese
educational and experimental psychologists were trained at either
the University of Chicago, where Dewey first worked with the
psychologists Angell and Carr, or at Columbia University, where Dewey continued
to develop his theories.
Chan Wing-tsit, in his history of modern Chinese philosophy, noted
that pragmatism was the first Western philosophy to become a concerted movement
in China: ‘It was the guiding philosophy of the renaissance set in motion by
Dewey’s pupil, Hu Shih . . . . Its philosophy of ideas as instruments to
cope with actual situations and its emphasis on results had special appeal to
the reformers.’ As for the content of what was to be studied in psychology,
Dewey advocated a functional; definition. Dewey did not believe human responses
to be passive, isolated reflexes. Mental and behavioral processes, he insisted,
could not be disengaged from their conditions and ,
more significantly, their consequences. What was to be considered ‘stimulus’
and what was to be considered ‘response’ were not abstract entities but
depended on the part each played in the coordinated efforts of the organism to
reach a goal or adapt to the environment. These views implied a favorable
attitude toward the applied branches of psychology. Indeed, Dewey had already
committed himself to a combination of psychology and education prior to going
to China.
Under Dewey’s
influence, educators in China began to take an interest in the child as an
individual; and there was an increased emphasis among educational psychologists
on studying those factors that the child brought to the learning situation: his
aptitudes and his capabilities. The old, established educational practices of
rote learning characterizing the classic Chinese education were now to be
judged according to their results for the individual child. In time, the
viewpoints of functionalism permeated other technical concepts of
educational philosophy and such specialties as testing and teacher training.
Functionalism
fitted into the mood of the times; and complemented by the traditional Chinese
tendency toward pragmatic behavior, it might be said that Dewey’s pragmatic
philosophy became an ideology in China. More important, the new philosophy not
only allowed but insisted on revamping and reconstructing no less than all of
the behavioral and cultural patterns, subjecting them to the tests of
usefulness and adaptability in contemporary situations. With the elaboration of
these doctrines into a methodology of ‘scientific testing’ of the functions and
consequences of a pattern of acting, there was, indeed, a rallying point for
all the revolutionaries in China. The reconstructionists
in philosophy represented a methodology and a set of substantial values on how
people should act. Social reformers of all kinds in China could find their home
in these views. Thus, Dewey inspired Chinese intellectuals in finding a philosophy
of change and reform.
With the
main course of development defined by functionalism in psychology and pragmatism
in education and social reform, other schools of psychology were introduced,
too, although in very minor ways. Gestalt psychology, with its abstract
emphasis on the whole and on organization, did not have many proponents. Psychoanalysis
was present in very circumscribed ways in a few quarters. The other points of
view that did take some root were experimental psychology, industrial
psychology (the Taylor system), and behaviorism.
Behaviorism
came into China via Kuo Zing-yang (Z. Y. Kuo), probably the Chinese psychologist best know to the
West for his contribution to psychology. Influenced by J.B. Watson at the
University of Chicago, Kuo assumed an even more
extreme behaviorist position than Watson’s. In the post-World War I period,
when the concepts of instinct and innate human nature and behavior were being
attacked by many, including Boas in anthropology and Floyd Allport
in social behavior, Kuo moved in 1921-1922
forthrightly to insist on discarding the concept of instinct altogether. Among
his arguments, he pointed out that the concept was based on the old exploded
notion of innateness and the operation of a mental or spiritual force. He
insisted that all so-called instincts were learned and that even reflexes were
acquired. At an international meeting of psychology in the twenties, he
exclaimed, ‘There are only one and a half true behaviorists in this world;
Watson is the half. I am the only true behaviorist.’
Following
the line of Kuo, Watson, in his next book on
behaviorism, came out strongly for a psychology without instincts. Kuo continued publishing his empirical research on
embryonic behavior and reflexes through the early thirties.(pp.6-8)
With
the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, Departments of Psychology were removed
to universities in the western provinces of China. At the end of World War II,
psychologists migrated with the National Government to Taiwan, while others went
to work in the United States.
Before
1949, there was no discernible Soviet influence in Chinese psychological
circles, whereas after the Revolution, the flourishing Western-inspired
psychology in Chinese schools was systematically uprooted, and Chinese
psychology was reconstructed on the premises of Soviet theory and methodology.
The Soviet
psychology that Peking modeled itself upon was a Marxist-Leninist psychology
with a philosophical base in dialectical materialism and a newly added
label, Pavlovianism. This new Soviet psychology
leaned heavily on Lenin’s theory of reflection, which was unearthed in his two
volumes posthumously published in 1924. Toward the late twenties a group of
Soviet research psychologists headed by Vygotskii,
along with Luria and Leont’ev, laid the groundwork
for a Marxist-Leninist approach to psychic development. Man’s psyche was viewed
by this group as a historical, developmental product, with emphasis on the
social roots of different aspects of man’s consciousness. Thus, the Soviet
psychology that China imported in the fifties proposed dialectical
materialism as the only position that truly unites the subjective and
objective worlds; image and reality were presented as inseparable parts of the
same reflection process. Here, Soviet psychology contrasted itself with Western
‘idealist’ psychology in which, it is maintained, consciousness or the image in
man’s mind comes first and objective reality is secondary.
When Lenin’s
theory of reflection became popular in the thirties, it provided the
philosophical bridge between Pavlovian physiology and
psychic processes. In fact, Pavlov was wooed by Lenin and, later, Stalin for may years with awards and sinecures, but during most of his
lifetime he expressed contempt and disdain for the Soviet regime and
ill-concealed rejection of its interference with science. In 1952, in a seminar
sponsored by the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences and attended by over 400
psychologists, it was officially promulgated to build psychology on the
philosophical base of dialectical and historical materialism as well as
on Pavlov’s teachings of the higher nervous system.(pp.10-11)
In
China, the field of psychology evolved between 1949, when the Communist Party
took power, and 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution. R.&A. Chin’s book describes this evolution in four stages: The first stage, which
they call ‘the Soviet phase,’ extends from 1949 to 1958.
It
is a period when the Soviet-inspired discipline displaced the US schools of
psychology and became the dominant influence in the Chinese institutions of
education and research. This inheritance from the Soviet Union was accompanied
by economic dependency, and soon the professional controversies which existed
in the Soviet Union appeared in China: whether psychology is a natural or a
social science; and the ‘fundamental dilemma’ of a dialectical-materialist
approach to psychology, namely, between the universalism of psychological
processes and the historicism of social class theory. Also present during the
first decade of the Chinese Revolution were the residues of ‘the old way of
thinking’, namely Dewey’s pragmatism and functionalism.(p.203)
The
Great Leap Forward, in 1958-1959, saw the second stage of Chinese development
in the field of psychology. In this period, a new activism challenged the scientism-universalism
position, representing a theoretical premise of “pragmatically oriented individuality
based on class analysis” rather than “process-centered” study. Now,
“psychological workers” --including nurses, students, industrial
managers—attempted to apply their theories in actual situations” “work, study,
and living.”
Traditional
boundaries of psychology were dissolved in the name of studying the concrete,
whole individual: a spirit of eclecticism pervaded the discipline, and research
began to cross national and ideological lines.
. . .
The
all-out enthusiasm required of every productive enterprise during that period
brought about a kind of practical inventiveness among psychologists, resulting
in a moderate amount of conceptual clarification and scientific advance. The
laboratory-trained, methodology-conscious scientists applied their craft to
more practical problems, such as the study of sensory perception in the factory
or classroom or the measurement of brain waves on the normal and mentally ill.
At the same time, less precise but more action-oriented studies were launched
by teams of workers in the medical, labor, and educational branches of
psychology to apply the concept of active consciousness to a variety of actual
human situations.
In the
course of focusing attention on the whole individual, questions that had not
been in the foreground previously now became pressing:
What makes
one individual produce more than another? What accounts for the optimistic
attitude of one person and the pessimistic attitude of another? What, indeed,
makes one individual want to change in the desirable socialist direction and
another backslide into, for example, the state of
neurasthenia? These questions were not yet couched in the concept of
motivation, which did not become prominent in research vocabulary till the
sixties.
In
answering these questions, psychologists began with the socialist axiom that the
ultimate and primary source of motivation lies in the socialist society itself.
This is the where the key concept of active consciousness come in, for through
it the movement of society toward its socialist goal is transplanted into
motivation of the individual who participates in history. The critical issue is
thus the extent to which the individual ‘reflects’ in his active consciousness
this march of history. The problem was how to mobilize this positive
spirit. . . .
In every research
setting, the studies concluded with the demonstration that active
consciousness, or the recognition aspect within it, plays a decisive role in
affecting the functioning of the individual: the neurasthenia patient improved,
the worker produced more or became moiré inventive, the student learned his
arithmetic aoir language or moral lesson better. In
short more the individual understands, the more he does what society wants of
him.(204-207)
Events
leading to the Sino-Soviet split had provoked a surge of voluntarism in Chinese society. The Great Leap spirit of
psychological research was eclectic and the slackening of ideological
constraints allowed psychologists to gather new data that would push against
the limits of existing theoretical assumptions.
This
relatively short period of high creative energy was followed by the third stage
in the development of psychology in China, according to these authors; 1959 to
1965 was an era of “consolidation and exploration.” Psychologists belonging to
“action-oriented teams” began to slow down their frenzied research activities
and scientifically oriented, methodologically sophisticated studies again
appeared. “Pure science” projects emerged, like those connected with information theory and human engineering, while research in
education continued to pursue the central question of motivation; soon the psychological factor played by recognition was discovered as being
inadequate to explain learning deficiencies. Children were behaving in
anti-social ways, not because of a lack of understanding, or because of their
social class relationships; rather it appeared to be due to such mental
processes as compromises and rationalizations. In other words, these
social disruptions were not because of the existence of the residues of
capitalist behavior and insufficient socialist indoctrination, but rather the
result of relationships within socialist society, and no amount of
“knowledge-building” would eliminate this cause. New concepts were created to
account for this phenomenon: among them were recognition motivation and reality
motivation. In this third stage, individuality
and individual differences were a new
focus of attention. They had always been present, of course, but in the first stage,
when psychology focused on abstract, universal processes, this subject of study
was irrelevant or unimportant; in the second stage, the Great Leap aimed at
mass results and the individual was again ignored. Now, in the third stage,
psychology was looking at the whole individual and asking how he/she got to be
the way he/she is. Instead of the earlier belief that all individuals were
potentially equal and could be raised to “the same level of excellence and
health,” it was now permissible to recognize the existence of innate
inequalities among individuals and the uneven development within a single
individual. By focusing on the individual, psychologists were challenging the
constraints imposed by the ideological dictum that social class relationships determine
the psychology of people, for non-class factors were now being studied. Before
the events of 1965, psychological inquiry was relatively unhampered because of
the comparative ideological relaxation in society. The Cultural Revolution
brought this period to an abrupt halt in 1965.
In
early 1965, the sayings of Mao began to appear in professional journals, and
the scientific branch of psychology was again attacked for its “abstractism” and its “biologism,”
which was characterized as producing the “capitalist concept of the nature of
man.” In this fourth stage of development, the critiques of psychology did not
attack the work of Pavlov per se, but rather insisted that his
work was not in the field of psychology at all. His theory of the higher nervous system was described as a ‘great
physiological discovery” which nevertheless cannot be transferred from
physiology to psychology.
The new
order was out: abandon ‘naturalism’ so that psychology can ‘march forward
toward dialectical matierialism.’
The new dogma was that psychology was not a science, but
rather a technology for implementing politically defined objectives. This
belief led to the corollary thought that Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was the only
revolutionary theory and that only those who lived in particular social class
relationships could understand the laws of social development and historical
materialism.
Capitalists,
reactionaries, and revisionists cannot discover the law of social development and are
unable and unwilling to promote the march of history. It therefore follows that
the function of will or volition, an unexplored aspect of the active
consciousness, is also said to be a function of class position.(p211)
The
authors conclude this book in 1966, be observing that the Cultural Revolution
in China cannot possibly efface the history of China and particularly the
history of psychological study in this nation, but nevertheless it may very
well bring to the fore a vast network of local community relationships unlike
anything that exists in industrial societies. The notable absence of a chief in
study groups and work teams, seems to be an organic
development in this society, which is rarely seen elsewhere, rendering the
interpretations of ideas and reality a collective practice and not an individual
therapy.
The
13 items below offer CEIMSA readers a glimpse of the material reality
which shapes (and sometimes distorts) our perceptions and our behavior. A
right-wing political agenda drives this reality, and yet the attempt to control
billions of people with ideas that fail to connect with their reality is doomed
to failure. A practical question facing all of us is: What price must we pay
before these artificial controls fail and we are permitted to get along with
our lives?
Item A., from The
Real News Network, is the report on yesterday’s US Senate vote
which defeated by a narrow margin the Keystone XL Pipe Line project.
Item B., from NYU Professor Mark Crispin Miller, founder of News
from the Underground, is an article by Max Blumenthal, describing how
the Israel lobby in Washington D.C. led the campaign to defeat US
Representative John Conyers’ amendment intended to neutralize the
neo-Nazi forces in Ukraine and reduce the violent confrontations between
Ukrainian forces and Russian separatists.
Item C., from Information Clearing House, is an
article by the former bureau chief for
the International Herald Tribune in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985
to 1992, Patrick Smith, which
was first published in Salon and invites readers to
participate in a deep analysis of US foreign policy’s Grand Strategy.
Item D., from ZNet, is a video interview with Noam Chomsky discussing NATO, the
puppet master and his puppets.
Item E., from Information Clearing House, is an
article by John Pilger describing British impatience with the expensive Swedish delay to
recognize the legal rights of Julain Assange.
Item F., from Information Clearing House, is an
interview with Russian President Vladimir
Putin on Russia’s commitment to the Russian-speaking population living in
Ukraine.
Item
G.,
from Jim O’Brien of Historians
Against War, is a series of recommended recent
articles and US war resisters in Canada links.
Item H., from Information Clearing House, is an
article by James Cogan on President Obama’s schizoid speech against
China delivered on November 15, during the G20 Leaders Summit at the University
of Queensland in Australia.
Item K., from C. Sham, is a home video coverage (in
French) of the demonstration against the Israeli Consul in Montpellier on 13
November 2014.
Item L., from Truth
Out, is an article by Henri
Giroux defending ‘the first casualty of war.’
Item M., from Michael Parenti, is an excerpt from his book discussing ‘The Great
War’ of 1914-18.
An
finally, we invite CEIMSA readers to watch with us a series from the popular
source of information and reflection, created by satirists Giordano Nanni and Hugo Farrant, using hip-hop to transform news
reporting beginning with the with the current Nov. 17 production of :
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12667
Sincerely,
Francis
Feeley
Professor
of American Studies
University
of Grenoble-3
Director
of Research
University
of Paris-Nanterre
Center
for the Advanced Study of American Institutions and Social Movements
The
University of California-San Diego
http://dimension.ucsd.edu/CEIMSA-IN-EXILE/
__________________
A.
From The Real News Network :
Date : 19 November
2014
Subject: The Keystone XL Pipeline
defeated in the US Senate Vote.
Obama has quietly approved the Alberta
Clipper, a cross-border pipeline between the U.S and Canada that will connect
with the southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline, say journalists Steve Horn
of DeSmogBlog and Cherri Foytlin
of bridgethegulfproject.org
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=12674
__________________
B.
From Mark Crispin Miller
:
Date : 19 November
2014
Subject: How the Israel lobby
protected Ukraine's neo-Nazis.
AlterNet has learned that an amendment
to the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would have forbidden
US assistance, training and weapons to neo-Nazis and other extremists in
Ukraine was kept out of the final bill by the Republican-led House Rules
Committee. Introduced by Democratic Representative John Conyers, the amendment
was intended to help tamp down on violent confrontations between Ukrainian
forces and Russian separatists.
How
the Israel Lobby Protected Ukrainian
Neo-Nazis
By Max Blumenthal
__________________
C.
From Information Clearing House :
Date : 16 November
2014
Subject: Connecting the Dots to
Understand American Foreign Policy and It’s Future.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
Ukraine, Iran's nukes, the price of oil: There are
ties worthy of a Bourne film, if the media connected the dots. “Life’s but a
walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing.”
What Really Happened in Beijing: Putin,
Obama, Xi And
The Back Story The Media
Won’t Tell You
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40239.htm
by Patrick L. Smith
__________________
D.
From Z Magazine :
Date : 13 November
2014
Subject: The Puppet-Master and his
Puppets.
How did Russia and the West slip back
into what seems like the Cold War all over again? How dangerous is the current confrontation?
Should the world be ready to face a nuclear war? World-famous academic,
linguist, philosopher and political commentator Noam Chomsky is on Sophie&Co.
NATO
became US-run intervention force
https://zcomm.org/zvideo/nato-became-us-run-intervention-force/
by
Noam Chomsky
__________________
E.
From Information Clearing House :
Date : 16 November
2014
Subject: States at War Against theTruth
and Julian Assange.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
Hell hath no fury like great power scorned.
The Siege of Julian Assange
is a Farce
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40246.htm
by John Pilger
__________________
F.
From Information Clearing House :
Date : 16 November
2014
Subject: Russian Resolve in Ukraine !
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
The Ukrainian central authorities have sent the armed forces there and they even use ballistic missiles. Does anybody speak about it? Not a single word. And what does it mean?
"We Won't Let It Happen"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40254.htm
Vladimir Putin Interview With German TV
__________________
G.
From Historians Against The War :
Date : 19 November
2014
Subject: [haw-info] HAW Notes
11/19/14: Links to recent articles of interest.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
From: "Jim O'Brien" <jimobrien48@gmail.com>
To: haw-info@stopthewars.org
Sent: Wednesday, 19 November, 2014 9:03:12 PM
Subject: [haw-info] HAW Notes 11/19/14: Links to recent articles of
interest
Links to Recent Articles of
Interest
"Foreign Policy: Can't Anybody Play This Game
Better?"
By William R. Polk, History News Network, posted November 16
A, eloquent, historically based article by a former State
Department official and history professor
By Fredrik Logevall and Gordon M.
Goldstein, Politico, posted November 16
Fredrick Logevall teaches history at
Cornell University; both authors have written books about the US war in
Vietnam.
"Do Wars Really Defend America's Freedom?"
By Lawrence S. Wittner, History
News Network, posted November 16
The author is a professor of history emeritus at SUNY Albany.
"25th Anniversary of Salvadoran Jesuits' Murders"
By the National Security Archives, posted November 16
Includes links to newly released US
documents from November 1989, showing an effort to deflect blame from the
Salvadoran military hierarchy.
"Title VI and Middle East Studies: What You Should
Know"
By Bekah Wolf, Middle East
Research and Information Project (MERIP), posted November 14
By David Vine, TomDispatch.com, posted November 13
"Al Jazeera Investigates the USS
Liberty Attack in 'The Day Israel Attacked America'"
By Colleen McGuire, Mondoweiss.net, posted November 11
"Veterans' Day through a Maureen Dowd Flashback"
By Jerry Lembcke, CounterPunch.org,
posted November 10
The author is a Vietnam veteran who teaches sociology at the
College of the Holy Cross.
"Act of Congress: Israel, Iran, and the Republican
Victory"
By Trita Parsi,
Foreign Affairs, posted November 5
"A Half-Hearted U.S. War Effort in the Middle East"
By Andrew J. Becevich, Los
Angeles Times, posted November 1
The author, retired from teaching history at
Boston University, is now a fellow at Columbia University's School of
International and Public Affairs.
This list was edited by Steve Gosch and Jim O'Brien, with thanks to Rosalyn Baxandall and an anonymous reader for suggesting articles
that are included. Suggestions can be sent to jimobrien48@gmail.com.
__________________
H.
From Information Clearing House :
Date : 16 November
2014
Subject: A War with China?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
A bellicose restatement that the US will use every means,
including war, to prevent any challenge by China to American dominance over the
Asia-Pacific.
Obama’s Speech in Australia:
A Threat of War Against China
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40253.htm
by James Cogan
__________________
I.
From Truth Out :
Date : 16 November
2014
Subject: The Death of Thomas Young.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/
“Maybe he got so exhausted by the enduring of it all
that he took a last sleep and never came back,” Cuellar wrote. “My conclusion
is that he died in pain from the exhaustion of having to endure it. Early
morning Monday, when I thought he was sleeping, I heard a silence I had never
heard before.
The Last Days of Tomas Young
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/the_last_days_of_tomas_young_20141116
by
Chris Hedges
_________________
J.
From William Blum :
Dates: 19 November 2014
Subject
: Anti-Empire Report, November
19, 2014.
Anti-Empire Report, November 19, 2014
http://www.killinghope.org/bblum6/aer134.html
__________________
K.
From C. Sham :
Date : 19 November
2014
Subject: Contenu interessant : le CONSUL À LA CCI DE MONTPELLIER.
BONJOUR À TOUTES ET TOUS
à
voir...
VIDÉO DE L’ACTION DU COMITÉ BDS FRANCE 34
CONTRE LE CONSUL D’ISRAËL À LA CCI DE MONTPELLIER
http://youtu.be/ndQSPMnsCfc
__________________
L.
From Truth Out :
Date : 18 November
2014
Subject: The First Casualty of War
is Truth; then the Messengers of Truth.
Ideological fundamentalism and political
purity appear to have a strong grip on US and Canadian societies as can be seen
in the endless attacks on reason, truth, critical thinking and informed
exchange. In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper decries what he derisively
attacks as intellectuals and journalists who are "committing
sociology" by which he means holding power accountable.
Academic
Madness and the Politics of Exile
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/27501-henry-a-giroux-academic-madness-and-the-politics-of-exile
__________________
M.
From Michael Parenti :
Date : 20 November
2014
Subject: [Clarity] 1918 ...if you
missed it the first time.
Francis,
I wrote a narrative piece about World War I,
done in "poetic prose" (I'm told);
sent out a couple of weeks ago. But a number of people did not get it. It was
posted on CommonDreams.com and DandelionSalad and a
few other online publications.
Below is a second try for my group mailing:
1918
by Michael Parenti
Looking back at the
years of fury and carnage, Colonel Angelo Gatti,
staff officer of the Italian Army (Austrian front), wrote in his diary:
"This whole war has been a pile of lies. We came into war because a few
men in authority, the dreamers, flung us into it."
No, Gatti,
caro mio, those
few men are not dreamers; they are schemers.
They perch above us. See how their
armament contracts are turned into private fortunes---while the young men are
turned into dust: more blood, more money; good for business this war.
It is the rich old men, i pauci, "the few," as Cicero
called the Senate oligarchs whom he faithfully served in ancient Rome. It is
the few, who together constitute a bloc of industrialists and landlords, who think
war will bring bigger markets abroad and civic discipline at home. One of i pauci in 1914 saw war as a way of
promoting compliance and obedience on the labor front and---as he himself
said---war "would permit the hierarchal reorganization of class relations."
Just awhile ago the
heresies of Karl Marx were spreading among Europe's lower ranks. The
proletariats of each country, growing in numbers and strength, are made to wage
war against each other. What better way to
confine and misdirect them than with the swirl of mutual destruction.
Then there are the
generals and other militarists who started plotting this war as early as 1906,
eight years before the first shots were fired. War for them means glory, medals, promotions,
financial rewards, inside favors, and dining with ministers, bankers, and
diplomats: the whole prosperity of death. When the war finally comes, it is
greeted with quiet satisfaction by the generals.
But the young men are
ripped by waves of machine-gun fire or blown apart by exploding shells. War
comes with gas attacks and sniper shots: grenades, mortars, and artillery barrages; the roar of a
great inferno and the sickening smell of rotting corpses. Torn bodies hang
sadly on the barbed wire, and trench rats try to eat away at us, even while we
are still alive.
Farewell, my loving
hearts at home, those who send us their precious tears wrapped in crumpled
letters. And farewell my comrades. When the people's
wisdom fails, moguls and monarchs prevail and there seems to be no way
out.
Fools dance and the pit sinks deeper as if bottomless. No one can see the sky, or
hear the music, or deflect the swarms of lies that cloud our minds like the
countless lice that torture our flesh. Crusted with blood and filth, regiments
of lost souls drag themselves to the devil's pit. "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'entrate."
(Abandon all hope, ye who enter.)
Meanwhile from above the
Vatican wall, the pope himself begs the world leaders to put an end to
hostilities "lest there be no young men left alive in Europe." But
the war industry pays him no heed.
Finally the casualties
are more than we can bear. There are mutinies in the French trenches! Agitators
in the Czar's army cry out for "Peace, Land, and Bread"! At home, our
families grow bitter. There comes a breaking point as the oligarchs seem to be
losing their grip.
At last the guns are
mute in the morning air. A strange almost pious silence takes over. The fog and
rain seem to wash our wounds and cool our fever. "Still alive," the
sergeant grins, "still alive." He cups a cigarette in his hand.
"Stack those rifles, you lazy bastards." He grins again, two teeth
missing. Never did his ugly face look so good as on
this day in November 1918. Armistice embraces us like a quiet rapture.
A big piece of the
encrusted aristocratic world breaks off. The Romanovs, Czar and family, are all
executed in 1918 in Revolutionary Russia. That same year, the House of
Hohenzollern collapses as Kaiser Wilhelm II flees Germany. Also in 1918, the
Ottoman empire is shattered. And on Armistice Day,
November 11, 1918, at 11:00 a.m.---the eleventh hour
of the eleventh day of the eleventh month---we mark the end of the war and with
it the dissolution of the Habsburg dynasty.
Four indestructible
monarchies: Russian, German, Turkish, and Austro-Hungarian, four great empires,
each with millions of bayonets and cannon at the ready, now twisting in the dim
shadows of history.
Will our children ever
forgive us for our dismal confusion? Will they ever understand what we went
through? Will we ?
By 1918, four aristocratic
autocracies fade away, leaving so many victims mangled in their
wake, and so many bereaved crying through the night.
Back in the trenches,
the agitators among us prove right. The mutinous Reds standing before the firing
squad last year were right. Their truths must not be buried with them. Why are
impoverished workers and peasants killing other impoverished workers and
peasants? Now we know that our real foe is not in the weave of trenches; not at
Ypres, nor at the Somme, or Verdun or Caporetto. Closer to home, closer to the deceptive peace that follows a
deceptive war.
Now comes
a different conflict. We have enemies at home: the schemers who trade our blood
for sacks of gold, who make the world safe for hypocrisy, safe for themselves,
readying themselves for the next "humanitarian war." See how sleek
and self-satisfied they look, riding our backs, distracting our minds, filling
us with fright about wicked foes. Important things keep happening, but not
enough to finish them off. Not yet enough.
*****
Michael
Parenti's most recent books are The Face of
Imperialism (2011); Waiting for Yesterday: Pages from a Street Kid's Life
(2013); and Profit Pathology and Other Indecencies (forthcoming January 2015).
See his website: www.michaelparenti.org.