[Peace-discuss] ron paul, teabaggers, and some of their best friends

[C. G. Estabrook]

On 5/5/10 1:55 PM, David Green wrote:
> One book that brilliantly describes the student movement is "The Radical
> Probe" from 1971. One of its primary themes is the suppression of the
> movement by primarily liberal faculty members--triangulating as usual. It
> also devotes plenty of attention to the Black rebellion on campuses.
> http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Probe-Logic-Student-Rebellion/dp/0689703406

I recently attended a commemoration of a student protest that fits that
description, at the University of Notre Dame, 40 years ago.  There, as across 
the country, (most) faculty and administration were pressing for the policies 
that led to the Kent State murders, a few weeks later.

The Notre Dame Ten were students who sat-in (they'd learnt from the civil rights
movement) against the war in the fall of 1969 and were rusticated for their 
pains. Several of them returned to campus for the anniversary and invited me to 
give introductory remarks to their convocation, viz. & to wit:

     MISE(RY)-EN-SCENE: REMARKS ON THE NOTRE DAME TEN, FORTY YEARS LATER
		Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis
		acciderit id est semper esse puerum.

"Not to know what happened before you were born - is to be a child forever,"
wrote Cicero, just before the beginning of the Christian era.

We'll be talking tonight about things that happened before many of you were
born, and our purpose is that you not be a child all your life, in spite of
quite strong forces in our society that encourage just that.

We'll be talking about some people I was privileged to know when they were
practically children - on this day forty years ago when they decided not to be -
and suffered for it.

And we'll be talking about institutions - government, corporate, academic, and
ecclesiastical - that caused great suffering by committing crimes and by being
actively and passively complicit with them.

The Notre Dame Ten and many others called our attention to those crimes.  And
they continue to do so.

	*	*	*

In order to understand the story we have to go back to the generation after the
Second World War, roughly from 1945 through 1969.  The United States was the
only undamaged major country to emerge from that war.  Russia had won the war
against Germany but had been devastated in the process.  The US had devastated
Japan from the air, not just with atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and
the US acquired what was left of the empire of our putative ally, Britain,
notably in the Middle East.  In the year after the end of the war, half of what
the world produced was produced by the United States.

What American planners (Republican and Democrat) were thinking was set out
clearly in 1948 in a secret State Department policy planning document [PPS 23 2/48]:

"We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its
population.... In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and
resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of
relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.... We
need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and
world-benefaction.... We should cease to talk about vague and... unreal
objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and
democratization.... we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The
less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."

[Noam Chomsky comments,] "recall that this is a Top Secret document. The
idealistic slogans are, of course, to be constantly trumpeted by scholarship,
the schools, the media, and the rest of the ideological system in order to
pacify the domestic population."  And the most idealistic slogan - and the
biggest lie - was that the US had to oppose the dire threat of communism,
emanating from the Soviet Union.

The USSR up to its collapse twenty years ago never controlled an economy even
half the size of that of the US.  In the years after World War II, when the US
insisted that it had to defend  Europe against Soviet attack by controlling
European armies through Nato, the mechanized divisions in the Russian army were
horse-drawn.  But dominant social groups in the US wanted to control the world
economy that had fallen into their laps, and the Cold War was born.

The Cold War was in fact functional for both the US and the USSR because it gave
them an excuse to control restless client states.  When the US wanted to
overthrow a recalcitrant government in Latin America, we said we were "stopping
communism."  When the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968, it
was to stop the reestablishment of capitalism.  But we can see now from the
distance of another generation, that the dominant partner by far in this malign
conjunction was always the Untied States.

"In 1955 the Communist threat was defined, very perceptively, in an extensive
study ... that involved a representative segment of the tiny élite that largely
determines foreign policy, whoever is technically in office. The primary threat
of Communism is the economic transformation of the Communist powers ‘in ways
which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial
economies of the West’. Communism, in short, reduces the ‘willingness and
ability’ of underdeveloped countries to function in the world capitalist
economy" dominated by the US.

That was the danger in South Vietnam, when President Kennedy decide to invade in
1962.  The people of South Vietnam (where most of the war was fought) didn't
have the good grace to accept the government that the US government had picked
out for them (as Latin American countries were taught to do).  They had the
temerity to resist, and the Kennedy administration decided to make an example of
them.  We killed four million people to demonstrate the Mafia principle that no
one was allowed to run independent operations in territory that we controlled.

It was in fact hard to see the real situation then, through the mass of
propaganda that the American government and media put forth throughout the
1960s, but the critical spirit grew throughout that decade.  (That's why the
Sixties have to be condemned by all sides today - see for example Barack Obama's
book.)  By 1969, when the Notre Dame Ten bravely and non-violently took on the
criminal complicity of the University of Notre Dame with that war, about 70% of
the public had come to regard the war as "fundamentally wrong and immoral," not
"a mistake."  University officials too knew what side they were on.

In the years after the Ten's demonstration, the US withdrew its troops from SE
Asia, but it didn't lose the war.  The American military had so destroyed and
poisoned the land and the people that the independent development that the US
had meant to forestall was indeed impossible.  The US did not achieve its
maximum war aims, but Vietnam and all SE Asia was forced into a subservient role
in a world economy dominated by the US.

There were three things that brought the war to an end:
    [1] the bravery and sacrifice of the Vietnamese people's resistance to the
invader;
    [2] the mutiny of the American conscript army in Vietnam, which led to the
withdrawal of American troops and the hasty end of the draft; and
    [3] the opposition of  the American people, like the Notre Dame 10.

"The protest movement began largely on campus, in very scattered ways. Each
effort seemed completely alone, and almost hopeless, in the face of enormous
antagonism [such as that shown by the ND administration]. But students
persevered, and small efforts inspired others, and finally grew to a major mass
movement ... largely as a result of the impact of student protest on general
consciousness. And that mass opposition compelled the business community and
then the government to stop the escalation of the war." [Chomsky]

And it is by the way a myth that the draft was the principal reason for the
protests.  The draft was always class-based - it caught people from the 80% of
the population who were poor and working class.  The 20% of the population who
went to college could always mange to escape it.  The student leaders of
protests were not in much danger of being drafted.  That's not why they
protested.

Again, in the next decade, the wide-spread protests against the Reagan
administration's murderous wars in Latin America - protests that were perhaps
even more broadly based than those of the 1960s - grew up without any threat of
a draft. And that itself was a result of the '60's protest.  When the Reagan
administration came into office in 1981, they modeled themselves on the Kennedy
administration, twenty years earlier, in many ways.  One was that they wanted to
put US troops into Latin America, as Kennedy had put troops into SE Asia.  But
the Republicans in the 1980s found that they could not invade other countries as
easily as the Democrats of the 1960s.  The Reagan foreign policy was driven
underground, as in the vicious war against Nicaragua, directly as a result of
the protests of the 1960s.

But America is in fact a more civilized place than it was forty years ago. In
the Middle East today the carpet bombing and chemical warfare that were the way
the Vietnam war was waged are impossible.

When the first Bush administration was able to arrange a foreign war in 1991,
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union - and the resulting absence of the
fake excuse for American wars since WWII: "stopping communism" - President Bush
Sr. exclaimed that the real advantage of killing people in the Persian Gulf was
that it showed "The Vietnam Syndrome is dead!"

By the "Vietnam Syndrome" he meant the revulsion in the US populace against wars
like Vietnam. US planners had to overcome at least that revulsion if the ongoing
foreign policy of the American elite was to continue to be enforced by war,
regardless of the reluctance of the American people.  And at the center of that
foreign policy was the insistence of the American government that it control
Mideast energy resources.  The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was actually to be
called "Operation Iraqi Liberation"  until it was noticed that the acronym
revealed too much...

	*	*	*

What the Pentagon calls the "Long War" (in the Middle East) did not begin with
9/11.  It stretches back deep into the twentieth century. During World War II
the US State Department described the Mideast is the “most strategically
important area of the world,” and the area's vast energy resources – oil and
natural gas – as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the
greatest material prizes in world history.” In the years since then, oil
companies and their associates have reaped colossal profits; but, even more
importantly to the US, control over two-thirds of the world’s estimated
hydrocarbon reserves provides what every administration since WWII has seen as
“critical leverage” over European and Asian rivals, what the State Department
called “veto power” over them.

The US does not need Mideast oil for domestic consumption, and we in fact import
very little oil from the Middle East.  But we insist on controlling the region
from Palestine to Pakistan, from the Caspian Sea to the Horn of Africa - and
will kill a lot of people to insure it, with Israel as our "local cop on the
beat," as the Nixon administration put it.

And it should by now be clear that – whether we call them al-Qaeda, Taliban,
insurgents, terrorists, or militants – the people whom we're trying to kill in
the Middle East are those who want us out of their countries and off of their
resources. In order to convince Americans to kill and die and suffer in this
cause, the US government in successive administrations has repeatedly lied about
the situation, the biggest lie being the current one, that the US is fighting a
"war on terror," as they expand the war to Pakistan, which they see as the
center of opposition to US control of the region.

There are many differences between the US war in SW Asia today and the US war in
SE Asia forty years ago, when the Notre Dame Ten acted against war and atrocity
- which the officials of the University of Notre Dame supported.  But the war
continues today, and from the same causes, the crimes of American institutions.

And we need once again "to realize what this really means, not in terms of the
ludicrous political theater of Washington and the media, not in the war-game
fantasies of think-tankers and armchair warriors, but in the actual costs - the
death and suffering of thousands of innocent people, the ruinous chaos and the
violent hatred engendered, the massive financial corruption and gargantuan debt
added to our already corrupt and bankrupt system, the further coarsening and
brutalization and militarization of our society, and again, because it bears
repeating, the physical and emotional destruction of countless human beings
whose only crime was to be born in a region targeted by the Great Gamesters of
the world, the warlords in turbans and those in Brooks Brothers suits, the
gangsters in the alleys and in the corridors of power - this is a bitter and
sickening thing” [Chris Floyd].

I'll conclude with an observation from a book I'd read just months before the
Notre Dame Ten took their action.  My ghostly father, the late Dominican
theologian Herbert McCabe of Oxford, had written, "...the relevance of
christianity to human behaviour is primarily a matter of politics, it is
concerned first of all with the [forms] of communication, the structures of
relationship in which people live." 			

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