[Peace-discuss] Evidence Of Things Unseen: The Rise of a New Movement

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I've never been a fan of Tom Hayden -- if I recall, it was of him Gore
Vidal said, "He's in danger of giving opportunism a bad name" -- but this
is a good talk, infornmed and insightful (and it illustrates once again
Estabrook's Incompleteness Theorem: "Nobody can be wrong all the time").
--CGE]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
AlterNet
Evidence Of Things Unseen: The Rise of a New Movement
By Tom Hayden
October 21, 2003

EDITOR'S NOTE: The following piece is adapted from a speech Tom Hayden
gave at the Bioneers Conference on Saturday, Oct.  19, 2003.

The chairman of our Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, has said that
"Intelligence doesn't necessarily mean something is true. That's not what
intelligence is."

Keep that in mind as I discuss what James Baldwin called the "evidence of
things unseen."

A few weeks ago in Cancun, I watched at the barricades as a South Korean
farmer appeared to shake his fist in militant anger at the dispossession
of his people. I did not see that he was committing ritual suicide with a
knife. As far as I know, neither did anyone else. Hours later, the WTO
issued a press release stating its "regret" at what it called the
"self-inflicted" wound that resulted in the farm leader's death. I began
to wonder how many other deaths we see but do not see. Farmers in India
poisoning themselves with pesticides. Farmers in America quietly
committing suicide. A rise in suicides among American soldiers in Iraq.

These unseen deaths should be seen as signs of the times.  They are birth
pangs as well. For example, in the past three weeks some 80 Bolivians have
given their lives -- hardly the first time in their 500-year-long struggle
-- but these cocoleros, these sweatshop workers, these indios, have
overthrown the government over globalization issues and sent their
mine-owning, American-trained president packing.

The evidence of things unseen. There is rising a new movement in the
world. It is bigger than the movement of the 1960s. Yet it is barely seen
by the experts and analysts.  They look only at the behavior of
institutions and politicians, not the underlying forces that eventually
burst into visibility.

The first strand of this new movement is the global opposition to the war
in Iraq and to an American empire.

One year ago this month, when over 100,000 demonstrators hit the streets
in Washington DC, the New York Times reported that surprisingly few
attended the anti-war march, perhaps out of fear of the sniper. National
Public Radio repeated the story. How could they not see the 100,000?
Apparently because such protests were not supposed to happen anymore.  
Both the Times and NPR were forced to apologize a few days later and
report the huge turnout. Then, in another correction, the Times announced
in February that there was a "second superpower" in the world in addition
to the White House, which was world public opinion. By then 10 million
people were demonstrating globally; two million in Rome, one million in
London, 200,000 in Montreal in 20-degrees-below weather -- even a brave
few in McMurdo Station in Antarctica.

The second strand is the global justice movement, which began with the
Zapatistas on the day NAFTA took effect, then surfaced in Seattle in 1999.
Those were called isolated events. Then came Genoa, Quebec City, Quito,
Cancun, the world social forums in Porto Allegre. Far from isolated
events, these were the historic battlegrounds of a new history being born.

Together these movements mount a challenge to an entire worldview. We are
experiencing an enlargement of dignity, an enlargement of what we consider
sacred and therefore off the table, not negotiable. The purported Masters
of the Universe are becoming as obsolete as those who once claimed the
divine right of kings. The earth and its people are not for sale; the
environment is not just a storehouse of materials for utilitarian
exploitation; and cultural identities can't be replaced as if they were
commodities, whether the treasures of Babylon or the rainforests of the
Amazon. This movement is saying that diversity will not be looted.

Why is this happening? No one really knows. Movements arise in mystery at
the margins, eventually change the mainstream, are repressed or co-opted,
and return to the oblivion we call official history.

One explanation is that the globalization of US military and economic
power is globalizing an opposition. It's a dialectic and, as it swirls and
intensifies it can even bring down George Bush.

This new globalization arises, some say, in response to a power vacuum
after the Cold War which the US filled. But contrary to the end-of-history
theorists, the failure and fall of communism did not mean the dialectic
was dead and that the wretched of the earth would quietly go away.

But globalization was emerging long before the 90s, before NAFTA and the
WTO, the World Bank and IMF. The settling of America itself was an act of
colonization and "development."  Then came Manifest Destiny, the defeat of
the Indian tribes, the annexation of the western lands, the wars with
Mexico, the seizure of Hawaii and the Philippines.

For indigenous people the Conquest is not over. Most of our foreign aid
programs and social policies are only efforts to reform the Conquest, not
end its invisible structure of power relations.

For Muslims, the Crusades are not over. We should ask if the Crusades are
over for President Bush. There was the alleged slip of the tongue when he
described the war on terrorism as a crusade. There was his Inaugural,
blessed by Rev. Franklin Graham, who denounced Muslims and proudly
presided over the quadrupling of missionaries in Iraq since the first Gulf
War. This week there is the revelation of another Christian crusader at
the pinnacle of the Pentagon, Gen. William Boykin.

To globalize and militarize are the two strategies of the US will to
empire, driving our movements toward a unified opposition.

The National Security Strategy of September 2002, which announced the Bush
Doctrine of pre-emptive war, also included the free market, free trade and
the FTAA as principles the Pentagon is bound to advance and protect. So
our official national security policy is about more than terrorism,
nuclear proliferation or legitimate military threats; it is about
defending what the document proclaims is a "single sustainable model for
national success."

Or as Thomas Friedman, globalization's leading defender, puts it: "The
hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonalds
cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas."

Take the example of Iraq today, the complete stripping and privatization
of the public sector (with only oil exempted so far). L. Paul Bremer, the
man who dresses in pinstripe suits and combat boots, who represents Henry
Kissinger's invisible corporate clients, is very clear that his mission is
to replace sovereign Iraqi control of its economy with a free-market model
controlled by absentee foreign owners primarily from the US. Helping
ourselves to the spoils of war is part of our national security strategy.

While there is growing opposition in this country to the American death
toll and budgetary costs of the Iraqi quagmire, there is virtually no
debate about our assault on the Iraqi public sector by the writ of Bremer.
Only a deeper joining of the global justice movement with the peace
movement can begin to expose and protest these policies.

Of course these are not new developments. Halliburton is connected to
Kellogg, Brown and Root, the Texas corporation that funded Lyndon
Johnson's rise to power. It also built the airstrips in Vietnam, which
became the corrugated metal fences at the US-Mexico border, and which is
today reincarnated as a virtual Dick Cheney subsidiary on the battlefields
of Iraq.

Similarly, the author of the so-called "clash of civilizations" thesis,
Samuel Huntington, is the same policy advisor who invented the doctrine of
"forced urbanization"  for South Vietnam, deliberately turning a
90-percent peasant culture into an urban "Honda culture" in a decade.

What's new is the audacity of the drive for an American-dominated planet.
"Empire is coming out of the closet" writes Charles Krautheimer. "What's
wrong with dominance?" asks William Kristol. And Max Boot calls for a
return to British-style imperialism complete with "enlightened
administrators in jodhpurs and pith helmets."

All this international expansion is seamlessly tied to the homefront. It
not only justifies the curtailment of civil liberties and the revival of
arrogant patriotism among the corporate media, but also unprecedented
increases in military spending, tax cuts and deficits. These are not
overreactions to September 11, or isolated policy excesses, but part of a
pattern of diminishing democratic rights and defunding democratic
government. They are a backdoor assault on the achievements of the Great
Society, the New Deal and before that the Progressive movement that
regulated capitalism at the turn of the last century. The Republican
agenda is to return to a society in which market values eclipse and
replace the role of the public sector in the economy.

Take for example Grover Norquist, who fancies himself a generalissimo in
the conservative revolution. Under the innocuous banner of "tax reform,"
Norquist hopes that enough tax breaks and budget cuts will "drown the baby
in the bathtub."

He's talking about defunding child care, health care, public schools,
public investment in the inner city, public investment in a restored
environment. He sees government, the public sector, as a failure to be
eradicated, not instead of an institution to protect us from the failures
of the market.

Or take Niall Ferguson, a major advocate of empire and contributor of many
influential articles in the New York Times, who has extolled the
Protestant Ethic as the major difference between America and Europe. Let
me take you through his clever argument on behalf of a WASP America.  
First, he notes that Americans attend church services in far greater
numbers than Europeans, evidence that Max Weber's "protestant ethic" is
alive and well here. As a result, Americans are inspired to work harder
and longer than the Germans, the French, the Dutch and Norwegians who are
"astonishingly idle," "work-shy" and, of course, "Godless."  He says the
Protestant Ethic is being replaced in Europe by "the spirit of secularized
sloth."

Ferguson is complaining that German workers are on the job just 1,535
hours a year in comparison with virtuous Americans grinding away at 1,976
hours. That difference of over 400 hours worked is the equivalent of 62
days a year.  Ferguson -- and corporate globalization defenders in general
-- want to stop Europeans from taking long vacations with their families
and retiring earlier to enjoy the quality of life. They want to roll back
-- they call it reform -- labor gains of the whole past century.

Well, I tell you, if Americans learn to read between the lines and
understand what the conflict with the Europeans is about, they will reject
the scapegoating and bashing that comes out of this Administration.

Instead of looking down our noses at the Europeans, we should be
Europeanizing our approach to work, vacations and leisure time -- and for
that matter, Canadianizing our approach to health care. How's that for a
progressive platform -- longer vacations for all!

Instead, because of cultural brainwashing, a recent survey showed that 19
percent of Americans thought they already were in the top 1 percent income
bracket, and another 20 percent believed they would be eventually. That's
what watching too much television in the center of empire can do to your
head, and why the struggle is a cultural one, not simply political or
economic, but a battle over how images and demons and fantasies are
produced and wired into our consciousness.

But there are unseen resources in our history that can fortify us for this
struggle. Thankfully, historians like Howard Zinn have shown us a
"people's history" that is just as important to restore as our cultural
and environmental resources.

There were those who opposed the original aggression and broken treaties
against the indigenous on these lands. We honor their example. There were
Americans who opposed slavery, who opposed annexation, who opposed the
wars with Cuba and Mexico, who opposed the subordination of women. We
honor them in our lives today. The Sierra Club was founded here, the
Abolitionists, the NAACP, the Suffragettes, the Populists, the emigrant
workers of Lowell who marched for bread and roses, they are present here
today. We have deep roots in movements against monoliths, monocultures,
monomaniacs and mammon.

Today the converging movements are in sync with the larger body of public
opinion, and spilling over into the mainstream. We see this in the
phenomenal growth of MoveOn.org, the grassroots support for Howard Dean,
for Dennis Kucinich, in the growing fear and loathing of the Pentagon, the
White House and Fox News.

Despite the spin, despite the play on our patriotic feelings, despite the
legitimate worries about terror, a majority of Americans -- and a strong
majority of Democrats -- are questioning the purpose of Iraq, the
credibility of the administration, the needless deaths, the unexpected
costs, and sacrifice of our domestic needs on the altar of empire. Dissent
has even appeared among military families and GIs on the battlefield,
angry about the callous manipulation of the body count to justify the
President's pledge that the military mission is "accomplished." Dissent
within the military is a sign that the end is beginning.

Because public opinion is moving, the Democratic presidential candidates
are changing their themes in a positive direction. Just last year, the
corporate centrists of the Democratic Party were counseling the candidates
to support the President's war, to divorce themselves from any allegiances
to the 60s, to wait for the Iraq war to end amidst cheering in Baghdad,
and then somehow defeat the president on incremental issues like
prescription drugs for the elderly. Talk about out of touch.

Now, in response to the public protests and plain questions of grassroots
Democrats, all the Democratic candidates are questioning the president on
Iraq, his trade agreements and jobs. Think of them as opportunists if you
will, but I think of them as a huge speakers' bureau carrying our
questions and themes to millions of middle Americans.

Each of us may decide to back an individual candidate, and that can expand
our movement. But let's not let ourselves be swallowed in any single
campaign. When the candidates ask for our time and money, let's also ask
them to join our movement around a new vision of what America can be.

As the global forums have insisted, "Another world is possible," words
embraced by the French foreign minister when the US war was rebuffed at
the UN. The vision of another world already is becoming manifest in local
struggles:

* A reform of the global trade system with enforceable standards to
protect sweatshop workers and rainforests, not simply investors in video
cassettes and privatizers of water.

* The re-regulation of crony capitalism, from Enron abuses to public
financing of elections.

* A shift from being the world's leading arms supplier to greater
investment in the UN's anti-poverty programs. In JFK's time we spent one
percent of our gross domestic product on fighting poverty; today it is
0.13 percent, little more than zero.

* Resisting the oil, chemical and utility conglomerates from Cheney's task
force to the Bolivian pipelines, towards energy conservation and
renewables.

* Promoting grassroots participatory democracy in decisions that affect
people's lives, as a vital ingredient in governing.

George Bush can be defeated; even the polls confirm it. But who knows if
the Democratic Party can defeat him? Who knows if we can bridge the
differences between the Democrats, the Greens and Ralph Nader? Politics is
a power struggle, not an exact reflection of public opinion. But the fear
and loathing are out there, building, and with enough dedication in 2004
we can remove this cloud over our future.

We owe it to ourselves, to our progressive traditions, and perhaps most of
all to the world, to prevent a second term for this president. The way to
assure a democratic future politically is to prevent what the
conservatives conceive as a Second Coming. So I ask your righteous
suspicions about electoral politics, set aside your attachments to any
single candidate, and see this as a powerful convergence of many campaigns
to defeat George Bush. The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.

If we do not succeed, we at least will have reached millions more people
with our message and networking, and we will need that public support in
the years ahead. Even if our best efforts fall short, remember than even
those who have the power can be forced to make big concessions.

SDS burned out and McGovern lost, but Nixon had to retreat from Vietnam
and recognize China. There came the vote for 18-year-olds, the end of the
draft, the creation of the EPA, OSHA, the Clean Air and Water acts.

Bush won the presidency with the help of his Supreme Court, but the same
Court ruled in favor of the gay-lesbian community against sodomy laws
after 40 years of struggle that began with riots in Greenwich Village. The
recent Court decisions on medical marijuana show the formidable power of
public opinion on the move.

It comes down to recognizing the dignity in all things.  Dignity has
intrinsic value, it cannot be violated without a resistance. It cannot be
defeated. Wherever there is life, dignity resists suffocation and
oblivion. That's the world we want. That's the world the world wants. Not
an empire, not even a world of great powers, but a world of democracies
based on dignity.

[Tom Hayden is a progressive activist, author and former California
elected official. His most recent book is "Irish on the Inside."]