[Peace-discuss] Bellicose rhetoric???

[John W.]

On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 11:09 PM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:

 John W. wrote:
>
>
>> Chomsky says that he differs with his Quaker friends who recommend telling
>> truth
>> to power.  Power already knows the truth, he says, and tries to cover it
>> up.
>
>
> This is true.  Personally, I think it's often more useful to speak lies to
> (those in) power.  But of course you have to figure out what you want to
> accomplish with your lies.
>
>
> One reason that it *Can* be useful to speak the truth to those in power is
> that
> they are at times subject to blind spots from which they can recover if
> pointed out by
> the word fitly spoken.
>

I suppose that's possible, though it's contrary to my experience.  Perhaps
my words and those of every other disenfranchised person with whom I'm
familiar have not been "fitly spoken" enough.  Even the great Randall
Robinson, whom I doubt anyone would accuse of unintelligibility or
inarticulateness, had this to say after almost 40 years of activism:

Excerpts from *Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America* by Randall
Robinson, 1998
            …Which brings us to the sine qua non for effective
outside-the-Policy-House advocacy: a gift for self-promotion, a gift used
or, more appropriately, misused to its fullest by those self-seeking souls
unburdened by any restraint of shame.  This is not to disparage
self-promotion, especially when it is an inadvertent by-product of a public
effort to alter wrongheaded public policy.  We have seat belts in our cars,
and consumer safety standards generally, because of the public advocacy of
Ralph Nader, whose formidable public stature has carried in its trail a
salutary and major public policy influence.

            My academic friends and the foundations that fund their
painstaking research appear to understand none of this.  For forty years of
apartheid, the tenured opponents of that system won grants, did research,
wrote monographs and books, gave testimony ad nauseam before Congress.  All
to no effect.  American policy toward South Africa had been and remained one
of de facto public and private embrace.  Few if any members of Congress felt
compelled to read or listen to anything the academic community had to
say.  Only
when a campaign of massive civil disobedience was packaged for public
participation in late 1984 did American policy begin to turn around.

            This is not the preferred way to make or influence foreign
policy.  But in America, if you are outside the Policy House, a position to
which virtually all blacks have been relegated, it is the only way to have
impact.  We have won most of the battles in which I have fought.  But the
price has been dear and I am tired and diminished by the process.  In all
the years of meeting with presidents, secretaries of state, national
security advisors, U.S. trade representatives, and members of Congress, I
cannot recall a single change of policy course that resulted from any of the
hundreds of discussions, the thousands of letters, the scores of
presentations to perfunctory nods and courteous closings.  Like water off a
duck's back.  It never ever meant a damn thing…

Pages 244-45
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