[Peace-discuss] Progressives Seek to Close "Enthusiasm Gap" for Evil
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Tue Oct 26 23:09:22 CDT 2010
Say No or Surrender: Progressives Seek to Close "Enthusiasm Gap" for Evil
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Written by Chris Floyd
Tuesday, 26 October 2010 12:14
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In these last days before the massively important, world-historical off-year
election, as all our good progressives are out there rallying the troops for the
beleaguered Democrats, trying to hold the racist, tyrannical, warmongering Tea
Party at bay, Scott Horton at Harper's
<http://harpers.org/archive/2010/10/hbc-90007762> provides us with yet another
reminder of just what kind of governance these poor, beleaguered Democrats are
delivering with the power they received in 2008.
Horton reports that Barack Obama has won a great victory for the power of the
state to falsely imprison innocent citizens, subject them to repeated abuse,
tell slanderous lies about them -- then absolve itself of any responsibility for
this systematic series of crimes ... crimes committed in the name of racist,
tyrannical warmongering.
Yes, Obama is back on the front lines in the legal battle to defend, uphold,
entrench and expand the worst abuses of power carried out by his loathed
predecessor. His Yoo-like legal minions have convinced the Supreme Court to
consider quashing a case that has been upheld by several lower, conservative
courts as one worthy to be heard in court. As Horton notes:
The case involves Lavni Kidd, a star football player at the University of
Idaho who converted to Islam and changed his name to Abdullah al-Kidd. He
was seized as he boarded a flight to pursue religious education in Saudi
Arabia in 2003. Justice Department officials claimed that he was needed as a
material witness in a case against another University of Idaho student, Sami
Omar al-Hussayen, who was charged with visa fraud. It does not appear that
Kidd knew anything relevant to the visa fraud case, federal authorities
never called him to testify, and the prosecution of Hussayn, which rested on
a feeble evidentiary case to start with, failed before an Idaho jury. The
claim appears now to have been a shabby pretext for arresting Kidd, whose
offense apparently consisted of converting to Islam and espousing views
critical of the Bush Administration and its plans to invade Iraq under false
pretenses.
Over a period of 16 days, Kidd was moved to three separate detention
facilities in three different states. He was treated brutally, according to
procedures that the Justice Department approved for use on terrorism
suspects. He was subjected to a withering interrogation by FBI agents who
demanded to know why he had converted to Islam. He was stripped naked,
subjected to body cavity searches, shackled hand and foot, and incarcerated
with violent convicts.
To secure Kidd's detention as a material witness, the Justice Department
made a series of false statements to the magistrate who issued a
warrant---claiming that he had purchased a one-way, first-class ticket to
Saudi Arabia, when in fact the Justice Department knew he had purchased a
return economy class ticket, for instance. It also withheld such information
as the fact that Kidd was a U.S. citizen who had cooperated with
authorities. The record strongly suggests actual malice and bigotry. These
facts no doubt played a strong role in persuading judges at the district
court in Idaho and on the appeals court in California of the merits of the
case. They therefore denied the Justice Department's vigorously argued
efforts to have it dismissed.
But Obama is tireless in his protection of tyranny. He seeks to defend it from
any and all challenges, small or great. It would be the easiest thing in the
world to simply step back and let this case be heard in court, let it be argued
on its own merits and decided accordingly. It would not require some harsh
denunciation of his predecessors, since he finds such things so distasteful. It
would not require him to support his predecessors. It would not require the
White House to do anything at all except to let justice takes its course.
But we know that our brave progressive paladin never takes the easy way. No, he
will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with George Bush and John Ashcroft, he will
stand up boldly, yea proudly, for jailing young students for voicing dissent,
for rigging up false charges based on deliberate lies, for stripping innocent
people and subjecting them to body cavity searches -- and for ensuring that no
minion of the state who so abuses innocent citizens need ever face the slightest
disturbance in his cushy, comfortable life. So he has fought it convince the
Supreme Court to hear his earnest pleas for throwing out al-Kidd's case and
protecting all those who abuse and pervert the power of the state.
This is what you support when you support Obama and the Democrats. And if we are
about to get another gaggle of rapacious rightwing geese flapping into the
corridors of power, it is precisely because the Democrats long ago sold out,
lock, stock and millions of smoking barrels, to the corporate-militarist elite,
leaving no genuine institutional outlets of opposition to corporate rapine,
continual war and state tyranny within the American political system.
Chris Hedges has much to say
<http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_world_liberal_opportunists_made_20101025/>
on this point:
The liberal class, which once made piecemeal and incremental reform
possible, functioned traditionally as a safety valve. During the Great
Depression, with the collapse of capitalism, it made possible the New Deal.
During the turmoil of the 1960s, it provided legitimate channels within the
system to express the discontent of African-Americans and the anti-war
movement. But the liberal class, in our age of neo-feudalism, is now
powerless. It offers nothing but empty rhetoric. It refuses to concede that
power has been wrested so efficiently from the hands of citizens by
corporations that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty
are irrelevant. It does not act to mitigate the suffering of tens of
millions of Americans who now make up a growing and desperate permanent
underclass. And the disparity between the rhetoric of liberal values and the
rapacious system of inverted totalitarianism the liberal class serves makes
liberal elites, including Barack Obama, a legitimate source of public
ridicule. The liberal class, whether in universities, the press or the
Democratic Party, insists on clinging to its privileges and comforts even if
this forces it to serve as an apologist for the expanding cruelty and
exploitation carried out by the corporate state.
As long as the liberal class had even limited influence, whether through the
press or the legislative process, liberals were tolerated and even
respected. But once the liberal class lost all influence it became a class
of parasites. The liberal class, like the déclassé French aristocracy, has
no real function within the power elite. And the rising right-wing
populists, correctly, ask why liberals should be tolerated when their
rhetoric bears no relation to reality and their presence has no influence on
power.
The death of the liberal class, however, is catastrophic for our democracy.
It means there is no longer any check to a corporate apparatus designed to
further enrich the power elite. It means we cannot halt the plundering of
the nation by Wall Street speculators and corporations. An ineffectual
liberal class, in short, means there is no hope, however remote, of a
correction or a reversal through the political system and electoral
politics. The liberals' disintegration ensures that the frustration and
anger among the working and the middle class will find expression in a
rejection of traditional liberal institutions and the civilities of a
liberal democracy. The very forces that co-opted the liberal class and are
responsible for the impoverishment of the state will, ironically, reap
benefits from the collapse. These corporate manipulators are busy channeling
rage away from the corporate and military forces hollowing out the nation
from the inside and are turning that anger toward the weak remnants of
liberalism. It does not help our cause that liberals indeed turned their
backs on the working and middle class. ...
The corporate state, by emasculating the liberal class, has opted for a
closed system of polarization, gridlock and political theater in the name of
governance. It has ensured a further destruction of state institutions so
that government becomes even more ineffectual and despised. The collapse of
the constitutional state, presaged by the death of the liberal class, has
created a power vacuum that a new class of speculators, war profiteers,
gangsters and killers, historically led by charismatic demagogues, will
enthusiastically fill. It opens the door to overtly authoritarian and
fascist movements. ....
The liberal class was permitted a place within a capitalist democracy
because it also vigorously discredited radicals within American society who
openly defied the excesses of corporate capitalism and who denounced a
political system run by and on behalf of corporations. The real enemy of the
liberal class has never been Glenn Beck, but Noam Chomsky.
The purging and silencing of independent and radical thinkers as well as
iconoclasts have robbed the liberal class of vitality. The liberal class has
cut itself off from the roots of creative and bold thought, from those
forces and thinkers who could have prevented the liberal class from merging
completely with the power elite. ...
Once the liberal class can no longer moderate the savage and greedy
inclinations of the capitalist class, once, for example, labor unions are
reduced to the role of bartering away wage increases and benefits, once
public education is gutted and the press no longer gives a voice to the poor
and the working class, liberals become as despised as the power elite they
serve. The collapse of liberal institutions means those outside the circles
of power are trapped, with no recourse, and this is why many Americans are
turning in desperation toward idiotic right-wing populists who at least
understand the power of hatred as a mobilizing force.
The liberal class no longer holds within its ranks those who have the moral
autonomy or physical courage to defy the power elite. The rebels, from
Chomsky to Sheldon Wolin to Ralph Nader, have been marginalized, shut out of
the national debate and expelled from liberal institutions. The liberal
class lacks members with the vision and fortitude to challenge dominant free
market ideologies. It offers no ideological alternatives. It remains bound
to a Democratic Party that has betrayed every basic liberal principle
including universal healthcare, an end to our permanent war economy, a
robust system of public education, a vigorous defense of civil liberties,
job creation, the right to unionize and welfare for the poor.
... As Wall Street steals billions of taxpayer dollars, as it perpetrates
massive fraud to throw people out of their homes, as the ecosystem that
sustains the planet is polluted and destroyed, we do not know what to do or
say. We have been robbed of a vocabulary to describe reality. We decry the
excesses of capitalism without demanding a dismantling of the corporate
state. Our pathetic response is to be herded to political rallies by
skillful publicists to shout inanities like "Yes we can!"
The liberal class is finished. Neither it nor its representatives will
provide the leadership or resistance to halt our slide toward despotism. The
liberal class prefers comfort and privilege to confrontation. It will not
halt the corporate assault or thwart the ascendancy of the corporate state.
It will remain intolerant within its ranks of those who do. The liberal
class now honors an unwritten quid pro quo, one set in place by Bill
Clinton, to cravenly serve corporate interests in exchange for money, access
and admittance into the halls of power.
The Democratic Party has become the enabler -- and the eager, avid /enactor /--
of the same sinister, inhumane, corrosive and murderous policies that liberals,
progressives, dissenters, true patriots (call them what you will) once fought so
hard to resist.
Now you can seek to close the "enthusiasm gap" ('Hey, did ya see that Big Dawg
Bill is out there on the hustings for us again? Yeehaw!') for the Democrats, you
can tremble in fear at the corporate-owned Tea Partiers (as if the Democrats are
not also corporate-owned by war profiteers, community eviscerators and rapers of
the land) -- but all you are doing is perpetuating the dynamic that has brought
the Tea Partiers and their ilk to prominence. All you are doing is guaranteeing
the further drift -- or rather, stampede -- of American politics toward the
openly fascist, brutal, barbaric future that Hedges describes above.
You are standing with tyrants, with those who strip and abuse innocent citizens,
with those who wage ceaseless, needless war, who kill the innocent, torture the
captive, and drive millions of innocent people from their homes.
As Arthur Silber has said so many times, why do you support
<http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2007/12/honor-of-being-human-why-do-you-support.html>
such things? Will you go on "making friends with evil
<http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2010/05/ii-story-for-children-making-friends.html>"?
Will you give your support to it yet again? Or, in Silber's words: "Will you
say, 'No''?"
<http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2010/05/iii-life-in-shadow-of-death-and-power.html>
Will you, at last, say No to this bipartisan cycle of horror?
There will be no end to the horror, and not the slightest possibility of healing
this broken society, and turning it, painfully, fitfully, toward something more
holistic and humane, until you speak that word.
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