|
our differences are substantial -- pivotal enough to influence our entire respective analyses.
I never meant to imply (as you suggested in "Secondly") that we must faithfully emulate earlier historical examples to protect ourselves against the Jihadist threat, and if that is the impression you got, the fault is wholly mine: I apologize accordingly. (Note to self: never attempt serious writing -- even for pleasure -- when punchy from a full day of serious writing for pay.) The point I was trying to make is simply that the history of all such anti-insurrectionist efforts is ominous, not the least because the countries and empires with the best records of "success" (used here NOT as a value judgement but in the police/military sense of achieving the objective) are often those with the very worst records on human rights: the Roman Empire (note especially the suppression of Queen Boudicca's Rebellion); Imperial Spain (especially the Inquisition, which burned people in the Americas as savagely as it did in Europe); the cited British, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, etc. Measured in terms of the extent to which the rebellion was suppressed, British "success" against the Mau Mau insurgency, which you mentioned in "thirdly," was total: Kenya remained a colony for another dozen years, and its subsequent liberation was not by revolution but by act of the British parliament. In imperial politics, "success" is always duration: the Roman Empire (including Byzantium) lasted nearly a thousand years; its Spanish, French, German, English and Austro-Hungarian descendants spanned another half a millennium. For revolutionaries so exterminated, oppression is forever.
I very much agree we should cherry-pick the lessons of history as appropriate and put our own (hopefully democratic) stamp on the methods so derived. I emphatically agree -- here again referencing your "thirdly" -- we have to be very careful how and where we use our troops. Indeed a major part of my differences with the administration over Iraq concerns (A)-the wanton squandering of our military's individual lives there (an expression of Bush's more general contempt for working Americans) and (B)-the resultant Iraqi civilian casualties -- including the grievances these casualties provide the insurgents.
Where we differ -- and this is a difference that colors our entire analysis -- is in our estimates of enemy capabilities (your "first of all") and the capabilities our own nation.
History is unequivocal in demonstrating the aggressive hostility of Jihadist Islam toward all non-Islamic cultures and peoples, and even (as in the present-day Sudan) toward Islamic peoples reckoned "inferior" merely because they are not of Arabic descent. Jihadist Islam has been at war with the great civilizations of our planet since 629 AD, when Muhammed conquered Mecca and disposed of all its non-Islamic inhabitants with unmitigated savagery. Not only was Western Europe twice invaded (the battle of Tours in 732 and the battle of Vienna in 1683); Eastern Europe was constantly wracked with warfare against Jihadists. Likewise Asia: the incredibly ancient Vedic civilization of the Indian subcontinent was utterly destroyed by the Jihadist onslaught -- so ravaged, a tiny band of British mercenaries called the East India Company was able to conquer the entire region in the 1700s. The bloody record of Jihad continues unabated into the modern era: 9/11 is merely one of its most recent chapters. Hence I stand on my estimate: the Jihadis are the most determined, capable and ultimately malicious enemy civilization (whether Western or Asiatic) has ever faced. History proves it beyond even a scintilla of doubt: no other adversary has ever come close, whether in individual zealotry or collective duration.
My estimate of U.S. capabilities is indeed negative. It is the byproduct of covering U.S. sociology and politics via a journalism career that spans nearly 45 years. My analysis is further shaped by (often bitter) lessons learned as an activist in the Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam War, Back-to-the-Land and alternative-press movements. My view is also also profoundly influenced by what I saw and experienced as a Vietnam-era Regular Army enlistee serving overseas (though not in Vietnam).
Probably the very best source ever on America's chronic ineptitude at foreign affairs (and all the reasons for it) is the Lederer/Burdick epic The Ugly American, which reveals all the spoils-system cronism, bureaucratic pettiness, careerism and anti-intellectuality of the U.S. diplomatic corps: it is as relevant now as it was in 1959. Another superb source is United States Marine Corps Col. William R. Corson's The Betrayal (Norton, 1968) which reveals how inter-service rivalry undermined the U.S. effort in Vietnam and therby exposes another of the realities -- specifically vicious political back-stabbing spawned by the careerist ethos of so many U.S. officials -- that constantly hamstrings even the best-intentioned American efforts abroad.
As to the U.S. educational system, I am probably uniquely qualified to comment on it: I have covered public schools for four newspapers in three regions, and as a college instructor during the late '70s and early '80s, I have surely helped cure some of the victims of the public-school-system's operational disease of anti-intellectuality. Though I no longer teach, I have ongoing connections to academia, and I am convinced our current crop of public-school students are hopelessly crippled by a combined, carefully conditioned inability to think logically -- a deficit bolstered by methodically induced aversion to all such thinking -- both ailments the educational-policy expression of the corporate oligarchy's demand for employees whose total reflexes are reduced to naught but zomboid obedience. The fortunate few who escape such conditioning seem to do so only through the increasingly rare gateway of intellectual parents and home libraries heavy on the classics. Nor is the problem anything new: it has been a long time coming. Indeed I was nearly one of public education's victims myself: born in 1940, I attended atrocious public schools in the South, one superb public school in the North, one mediocre public school in the North, and a parochial school in the South, Roman Catholic and taught by nuns. During the entire dozen years, only the parochial school provided me with genuine education -- that is, organized encouragement of intellectual curiosity and training in logical thinking, questioning and ferretting out information. Moreover, the academic discipline of parochial school required I constantly do my best work. By comparison (with the very notable exception of two classes taught by one truly remarkable English teacher), my public school years were unbroken terms of utter wretchedness and sheer boredom: mind and body straitjacketed in the rigid mandatory motionlessness precursory to success in the corporate workplace. Probably all that saved me from the rebellion of juvenile delinquency or self-destruction via alcohol and drugs was getting an after-school job at a morning newspaper when I was 16.
As to the capabilities and nature of local police departments, I have covered crime in five states and New York City, and as a result of my movement involvements, I have also been, as it were, on the opposite side of the police line in most of these locales. But I have found the cops are everywhere the same: some are superb officers and compassionate human beings, many are mediocre, a tiny fraction are genuine savages, and a few -- invariably at key levels in the chain-of-command -- are obscenely corrupt (though this is absolutely not to imply that all police commanders are crooked.) Moreover the corruption is encouraged by the system: it is merely the law-enforcement expression of the fact that in the United States everything is ultimately about money (or the status money can purchase) and that our nation therefore has -- precisely as my fellow skeptics so often say -- "the finest politicians money can buy." A superb book on the topic of police corruption and why it is endemic to U.S. society (and capitalism in general) is On the Take: from Petty Thieves to Presidents, by sociologist William J. Chambliss (Indiana University Press, 1978; second edition 1988). Chambliss' research totally confirms my overall impression of U.S. policing: that its notable successes are invariably the result of the ability of a rare few to overcome inertia -- and sometimes, as in the Serpico case, violent opposition. Bottom line (and during the relevant parts of my newspaper career I had some exceptionally close and absolutely dependable police sources), U.S. police departments are never more or less than the politicians who control these organizations will allow them to be. The hidden issue is therefore the politicians' real fear that greater police efficiencies demanded by defense against Jihadist terrorism will spill over into greater police efficiencies against the graft and corruption that any real journalist knows is endemic to American society. Again, I urge you to read Chambliss for a true picture of how the system really works: the terrifying possibility of Jihadis buying off police and politicians is implicit. So is the inevitability that the politicians (and the plutocrats who own them) will abuse increased police powers for their own tyrannical purposes.
Even so, I am not quite as negative as I may appear. I agree whole-heartedly with you when you say, "... we'll need better leadership than what we have now. Our current administration wants us to be something we aren't--an oligarchy or a tyranny of some sorts. That's not who we are, and we need to change our leadership to be more true to what our Founding Parents put into place." This is a profound statement because it expresses precisely the essence of the entire present-day political conflict in the United States: a bitter and now-rapidly escalating fight over who we are, and who we shall be. My negativity arises from three facts: (A)- that never in history has the U.S. been so intellectually ill-prepared for this sort of battle; (B)- that, specifically because of our intellectual deficits, our internal adversaries -- the capitalist oligarcy and its Christofascist stormtroops -- have been able to manipulate the Jihadist threat into a cover under which to impose their global New Order: obscene wealth and power for the few, defacto slavery for the many, theocracy (whether Christian or Islamic) to control and opiate the masses; and (C)- that the pivotal, truly terrifying difference between the modern crisis and all other such turning-points in U.S. history is that now -- unlike all those other occasions -- we on the Left have neither leaders (whether present or potential) nor analysis (such as the clash of Marxism and Fascism provided during the New Deal years) capable of healing the horrendous vacuum of leadership and ideas. Throughout history, when other such empires, nations, cultures and civilizations reached this impasse, they were irrevocably doomed. The one tiny candle-flame of hope I see in all this darkness is Democratic Underground itself: the faint but deliciously compelling possibility some of the political debate on this site heralds genuinely radical reawakening.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
