[Peace-discuss] Common Sense

[C. G. Estabrook]

[There's an independent quarterly journal at the University of Notre 
Dame called Common Sense, which was founded twenty years ago.  The 
following piece was written for their anniversary issue, but I thought 
some on this list might be interested in -- or want to argue with -- 
these comments on recent history and politics.  --CGE]


	TWENTY YEARS AFTER; OR, COMMON SENSE ABOUT THE RECENT PAST

	"...what an Aristotelian would recognize as education still
	does go on in homes, churches, political groups, charitable
	organizations, and even to some extent in universities.
	Such a tradition can be the starting-point for establishing
	some understanding of the good life, in terms of which
  	we can reappraise and criticize the whole tradition that
	we have received."  --Herbert McCabe, OP

Someone gave me a copy of *The Three Musketeers* when I was a boy, and I
was captivated by Dumas' tale, and by the historical setting, although I
knew nothing about 17th century France.  I read that there were sequels,
and was shocked to find that the first was called *Twenty Years After*
-- and that the next, *The Vicomte de Bragelonne* was set another ten
years on!  An impossibly long period of time, I thought.  How could the
characters still be interesting, once they'd become so old?

It was a revelation to my youthful insouciance that the characters in
the sequels were even more interesting as the vicissitudes of their
lives accumulated -- and the history, in the sense of past politics,
became even more important, to them and to me.  A detailed knowledge of
the politics of the Fronde (1648-53) may not have been much use to me,
then or now, but the picture of the interaction of the personal and the
political never left me.

Graham Greene remarks somewhere about the definitive intellectual
influence of youthful reading, even if not always of the best sort.
Just as Dumas' romances led on to an interest in early modern
ecclesiastical and political history, so Isaac Asimov's use of Arnold
Toynbee in his science fiction led to my finding Toynbee's study (in the
abridged two volumes), and that led to the Master of Those Who Know
historical changes, Karl Marx.

Marx and Engels attempted to descry the determinants on politics and the
person in the modern economic order, and so of course had very little to
say about socialism.  The collapse of official Marxism-Leninism in the
last twenty years means that we can attempt to understand those
determinants again. As Perry Anderson wrote more than thirty years ago,
"The immense intellectual and political respect we owe to Marx and
Engels is incompatible with any piety towards them."  He noted for
example that "Engels's historical judgments are nearly always superior
to those of Marx.  He possessed a deeper knowledge of European history,
and had a surer grasp of its successive and salient structures."

An important change in the past twenty years is that there is now no
danger that Marx and Engels be taken as religious texts, and so the
questions that they raised may be considered again.  Noam Chomsky
pointed out that "the disappearance of the Soviet Union is a small
victory for socialism, much as the defeat of the fascist powers was."

But the soi-disant Left in the US instead gave way to the fissiparous
tendencies of "identity politics"; worse, instead of taking up anew
questions of politics and society, the academy forswore "grand
narratives" and -- claiming to be "radical" but not wishing to risk
anything --  backed into the the blind alley of Postmodernism.

Critic Terry Eagleton writes that academic cultural theory "has been
shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love,
biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent
about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and
foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and
disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of
human existence to fall down on. It is also ... rather an awkward moment
in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such
fundamental questions."

The universities' choice of the quiet life in the last generation made
the existence of Common Sense and similar publications necessary.  Most
of them appeared on the internet, once that became possible, as a
concomitant to political activism in America.  It is simply a myth that
activism died with the Sixties, important as the decade from the death
of Kennedy to the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam was for the
destruction of the post-WWII ideological rectification campaign.  That's
why the Sixties are so reviled in the similar campaign of the last
thirty years.

It is also a myth that the ending of the draft in 1973 -- part of the
Pentagon's response to the revolt of its expeditionary force in Vietnam,
a matter still largely ignored by the histories of the era -- led to the
end of the antiwar movement.  On the contrary, the US government ended
the draft because of the strength of the movement.  It found what the
French had found earlier in Vietnam -- that a colonial war cannot be
fought with a conscript army.  That's why it's unlikely that the
Pentagon today will press for the revival of the draft.

The movement of the 1970's -- broader and more inclusive in terms of
issues than that of the Sixties -- produced what was paradoxically in
effect the most progressive administration since WWII, despite its
stated views: Nixon-Ford.  That's part of the reason why Alexander
Cockburn of *CounterPunch* argues that "it has always been our position
that Gerald Ford was America's greatest President," in spite of the
major crimes of those administrations, from COINTELPRO to the invasion
of Timor -- against which Watergate was a bagatelle.

The trends were so frightening to the US elite that they said so
publicly: in 1975 the Trilateral Commission -- the American members of
which were drawn from the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign
Relations and the Ford Foundation, with President Carter's National
Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski at their head -- published *The
Crisis of Democracy*.  The crisis was that there was *too much*
democracy, that the public had got the dangerous idea that they could
actually control the US government.  That had to be quashed, and the
Carter-Reagan years saw the counter-attack, at the high point of which,
twenty years ago, the need for the discussion that *Common Sense*
promoted became apparent.

The anti-war movement of the 1980's -- largely church based and outside
the universities -- was able to do what the Sixties movement had not
been able to do.  At the outset of the Reagan administration, the US
government had wanted to put US troops into Central America, as the
Kennedy administration had done in Vietnam.  (In many ways the Reagan
administration patterned itself on Kennedy's.)  But the threat of public
opposition -- the "Vietnam syndrome" -- prevented them from doing so.
US government foreign policy had to go underground, in the vicious
Contra war against Nicaragua, and throughout Central America.  It was
only in the administration of Reagan's successor, George Bush Sr., that
the US was able to engineer a demonstration war in Central America
(Panama, 1989) and then one in the Middle East in 1991, the principal
success of which Bush claimed was to end the Vietnam syndrome.

Nevertheless George Bush Jr.'s invasion of Iraq in 2003 was preceded by
the largest world-wide anti-war demonstrations in history, contrasting
sharply with the absolute silence that greeted Kennedy's invasion of
Vietnam in 1962.  One indication that comparisons between Vietnam and
Iraq don't work too well is that, in the obscene calculus of killers and
killed, the Bush-Clinton-Bush reduction of Iraq is only about a quarter
of what Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon were able to do in destroying peasant
society in Southeast Asia, a region vastly less important than the
Middle East to the political elite of the US.

Despite the present crimes of this most dangerous of American
administrations -- its policies have brought us as close or closer to
the use of nuclear weapons than those of any Cold War administration --
the US is a far more civilized place today than it was after the
Second World War.  What was possible for a Kennedy or a Reagan is
not so easily done by a Bush Jr. -- and therefore the administration has
had to launch direct assaults on the Constitution, notably in the
Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and Bush's signing
statements.  It has had to make ever wider war with little popular
support, in anxious expectation that emergencies will produce that
support: the Bush administration, more than any other since Truman's,
needs alarums and excursions.

Of course twenty years ago there was no dearth of prophets calling
America back to what the public thinks of as American principles, and
exposing how these principles are lied about by our ideological
institutions, such as the universities and the press.  It is for example
twenty years since Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann wrote *Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Communication* (Pantheon, 1988),
where they put forth a model of how elite propaganda works in the US --
and why our rulers think it necessary.

The very first task of the American political class is to hide the
fact that its interests are different from and opposed to those of the
vast majority of Americans (to say nothing of the rest of the world).
It must neutralize public opposition.  As the sociologist Robert Putnam
has argued, one of the effects of the modern American political system
is to dissolve those bonds, from sports clubs to labor unions, that have
been recognized as essential for democracy from Aristotle though
Tocqueville.

American business wants you sitting in front of your TV or
computer screen, watching your Ebay bid or a paradoxically named
"reality" show.  It certainly doesn't want you doing anything more
politically than pulling a lever (or touching a screen) to ratify the
rule of essentially indistinguishable candidates -- who will follow
essentially the same policies (about which the public is often told only
after the fact).

This, too, is not all that new.  "Your people, sir, is nothing but a
great beast!" said the founder of the US economic system, Alexander
Hamilton.  It remains true today that the only enemy the executive
committee of the US business class -- the US government -- fears, is the
American public.  The foreign policy elite of the US, the Council of
Foreign Affairs, has just issued a lengthy report, *After the Surge*,
arguing for down-playing the war the Iraq (not of course for abandoning
its goals, the control of Middle East energy resources) because it is
"Better to withdraw as a coherent and somewhat volitional act than
withdraw later in hectic response to public opposition to the war in the
United States."

As the US government pushes ahead with its absolutely mad (but not
irrational) drive for world hegemony -- and shows that it is entirely
willing to risk even the survival of the race for control of the earth
-- a true account of the political situation must, like the gospel, be
preached in season and out of season.  I admired the late anarchist,
Karl Hess, who began his political career as a speech-writer for Barry
Goldwater in 1964: he once suggested that "the most revolutionary thing
you can do is get to know your neighbors."

*Common Sense* has been doing that for the Notre Dame neighborhood --
and beyond -- for twenty years.  Good on you.  Keep going.  --C. G.
Estabrook

	*	*	*

[C. G. Estabrook <galliher at uiuc.ed> taught history briefly at Notre Dame
almost forty years ago.  He enjoyed it and didn't intend to leave.  He
recently retired as a visiting professor at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, where he hosts two local weekly radio programs, one
on politics, "News from Neptune" <www.newsfromneptune.com>, and the
other on poetry, "From Bard to Verse: A Program of the Spoken Arts."  In
2002 he was the the Green party candidate for Congress for the 15th
Illinois Congressional District.]

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