VDH's Private Papers::Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old

VDH's Private Papers::Stories of Imperial Collapse are Getting Old

Bush Pulls 'Neocons' Out of the Shadows

Bush Pulls 'Neocons' Out of the Shadows

Commentary :: Evan Coyne Maloney :: AcademicBias.com

Commentary :: Evan Coyne Maloney :: AcademicBias.com

WSJ.com - The Darker Side of Colonial Hong Kong

WSJ.com - The Darker Side of Colonial Hong Kong

FW: Reuters.co.uk - Humanists and atheists look to higher profile - Mon January 03, 2005 05:27 AM ET

 

Humanists and atheists look to higher profile

Mon January 03, 2005 05:27 AM ET By Robert Evans GENEVA (Reuters) - Humanist and atheist groups around the world are looking to boost their profile in 2005 to counter religious fundamentalism and efforts by some Western leaders to relaunch faith as a keystone of national life. Under pressure from the rise of militant Islam, Vatican activism in the European Union and the re-election of a "born-again" Christian to the White House, they feel they must resist to ensure the ideas of secularism survive and spread. "In the face of the religious onslaught on Humanist values, we have to speak out and get our message over," says Roy Brown, Swiss-based president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) which links groups totalling millions of members. Two central events will be a World Atheist Conference at Vijayawada in India in early January and the IHEU's World Congress in July at the Paris headquarters of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. "We must work hard to combat the encroachment of religion on public policy and on the rights of non-believers everywhere," said IHEU executive director Babu Gogineni. Atheists, who see no evidence for the existence of a deity, and Humanists, who are mainly atheists but include some believers, share that core concern: to keep religion out of politics and limit it to the private sphere. They draw their inspiration from freethinkers down the ages, from ancient Greek and Indian philosophers through the 18th century Enlightenment that shaped much of modern political thinking in Europe and North America. PRINCIPLES ATTACKED But they see key Humanist principles -- respect for human rights and racial and sexual equality with morality based on reason rather than on the dictates of a supreme being through a holy book -- as under assault, and not just in Muslim countries. The re-election in November of George W. Bush, U.S. Humanists fear, strengthened the influence of Christian fundamentalists dedicated to restoring the Bible, "God's word," to a central role in public life and foreign policy. Many of Bush supporters appear to see the war in Iraq in the same terms as the president, and Muslim fundamentalists, as one arena of a cosmic struggle between good and evil in which what Humanists would regard as crimes are permissible on both sides. Bush's triumph has also boosted opponents of abortion and homosexuality, as well as supporters of Intelligent Design (ID) which rejects evolution -- the development of all life on earth from lower forms through natural selection of the fittest -- as elaborated by 19th century British naturalist Charles Darwin. The ID movement emerged from the ranks of U.S. creationists, who believe the Bible is literally correct and that their God created the world and all in it. ID limits itself to arguing that an intelligence must have shaped life. In many U.S. states, fundamentalists on school boards ensure that creationism -- taught widely until the late 1960s -- is still present in some form. ID supporters are now demanding that their beliefs be taught alongside evolution. Last month British philosopher Anthony Flew, long a champion of unbelief, announced to the dismay of some fellow atheists that he was now convinced an intelligence must have provided the spark of life and perhaps even done some designing. His "conversion" was greeted with delight on creationist and Catholic websites. But Flew hastened to clarify that he believed that the intelligence involved was not the Christian, Jewish or Moslem "personal" deity, and that there is no "afterlife." GOD OF THE GAPS Atheist scientist-thinkers, like British biologist Richard Dawkins, said Flew had simply come to "the god of the gaps" -- a view held by some philosophers but few scientists that some "force" must have been at play because science has not pinned down how life could have begun otherwise. In Britain, many Humanists feel that Prime Minister Tony Blair -- a strong religious believer -- and members of his government are undermining secular traditions. They point to his promotion of faith schools run by various religious communities, including two financed by a fundamentalist businessman where creationism is taught as science. Blair's push for a new law that would protect all believers from "incitement to hate" on the grounds of their faith -- a key demand of Muslim activists -- is bound to restrict criticism of religion as such, Humanists argue. His readiness to bend government policies to the views of "faith" leaders, they say, has led religious hard-liners to demand ever more concessions on social and cultural issues such as limiting the right to stage plays that might offend religion. In most Muslim countries, religion and politics are closely intertwined and apostasy or renunciation of the faith is often a criminal offence. Penalties include execution, but "apostates" are routinely treated as outcasts and harassed. Secular and evangelical Christian groups launched a campaign at the United Nations last year to convince Islamic leaders to work to change this, but to little effect. SOME ADVANCES However Humanists see some advances over the past year in Europe, Asia and even in Africa where atheists have begun to organise. In Europe, Vatican efforts to have the EU constitution include a reference to the continent's Christian heritage were blocked. The European Parliament voted to bar a traditionalist Italian Catholic from becoming the new justice commissioner. France's ban on Muslim headscarves in state schools was imposed in September with few problems, despite warnings that it would unleash protests and alienate many in Europe's largest Islamic minority. In Spain, the Socialists replaced the Catholic-inspired Popular Party after its decade in power and began a series of secular reforms angering the Church hierarchy, including a move to allow gay marriage. The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party lost power in India's general elections to the firmly secular Congress Party. Even at the United Nations there was good news from for Humanists. Bangladeshi writer and medical doctor Taslima Nasrin, living in exile after criticising Islam and an active campaigner for the rights of women and the non-religious, was awarded a UNESCO prize for promoting cultural tolerance. But at the same time a Vatican campaign led to the world body adding "Christianophobia" to "Islamophobia" and anti-Semitism as issues its human rights bodies report on -- a sign for many that religious forces are reinforcing their grip.

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Christian Conservatives Turn to Statehouses

The New York Times > National > Christian Conservatives Turn to Statehouses

Argentina

Wlad Godzich recommends greater attention to Argentina to comprehend the present. In his spirit, I make a small list of some materials.

Books:

Articles:

1. "Helping Themselves," In these Times November 26, 2004
2. Paul Krugman - Borrow, Speculate and Hope
3. Argentina's Economic Rally Defies Forecasts
4. Hold the Applause: Argentina Isn't Well Yet - - WSJ
   

Films:

1. Fernando Solanas’ 2004 documentary Memoria del Saqueo
2. Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, The Take

Titles on Current Crisis

I will try to keep a reasonably current list of titles that come to my attention and strike me as worth reading. I will also attach reviews or comments. I hope you will all add to this effort.

PAB

Books:

1. Benjamin Barber, Fear’s Empire. Norton, 2004. For a review see, "The Kantian imperative and the war on terror," Nicholas Lezard Saturday, November 27, 2004. The Guardian http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1360575,00.html

Articles:

1. "Taking back America," Anatol Lieven. LRB Vol. 26 No. 23 dated 2 December 2004
2. "Interrorgation Policy Proves Elusive," WSJ December 13 2004
   

Boston.com / News / Nation / From left, religious figures make a push

Boston.com / News / Nation / From left, religious figures make a push

The New York Times > Education > Court Allows Universities to Bar Military Recruiters

The New York Times > Education > Court Allows Universities to Bar Military Recruiters

The Supreme Court will reverse this decision. PAB

Los Angeles Times: GOP Plants Flag on New Voting Frontier

Los Angeles Times: GOP Plants Flag on New Voting Frontier

Tony Bogues wants to give attention to regionalism in the US. This is the second report in major papers to cover the emergence of voting blocks outside urban aggregations. Not quite country, but certainly not city, these people and these living clusters represent an important anti-modern and anti-urban viting block, whose economic life seems determined by modernity's 'virtues'--cars, satellites, cable, internet, etc. PAB

Neo-Cons Consolidate Power, Retain Foreign Policy Ambitions

Reuters News Article

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Neoconservatives Gain Strength in New Bush Team
Wed Nov 17, 2004 02:31 PM ET

By Alan Elsner

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Neoconservatives, seen as the ideological architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, appear to be gaining strength in President Bush's second administration, foreign policy analysts said on Wednesday.

The "neocons," as they are known in Washington seemed in ideological retreat a year ago after the U.S. occupation of Iraq was shaken by a bloody insurrection.

Led by Vice President Dick Cheney, they argued that U.S. interests and values in the Middle East were best pursued through "regime change" in Baghdad. They predicted that U.S. troops would be welcomed as liberators and that a democratic Iraq would quickly emerge and lead to the spread of democracy throughout the region.

Although these rosy scenarios have not played out, at least not yet, Bush seems more than ever committed to them and to those who advocated them.

"The neocons are feeling quite confident right now. Things are breaking their way. A group of people who in any rational culture should be looking for other jobs are being promoted," said Jonathan Clarke of the conservative Cato Institute, co-author of a book on the neoconservative movement.

Many key appointments in Bush's second term remain to be made. But analysts believe the replacement of Colin Powell as secretary of state by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has already strengthened the neocons' hand.

Many are watching to see whether undersecretary of state John Bolton, a hard-liner on confronting Iran and North Korea, is promoted to the number two position at the State Department. Meanwhile at the Pentagon, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and undersecretary Douglas Feith, both key neocons, remain firmly in place.

"Bush has made it clear he wants to fight and win the war against various radical Islamic terrorist movements and he wants to expand the boundaries of the free world. He will use all available tools but diplomacy is always more effective when backed by the credible threat of force," said Clifford May, a former communications director for the Republican Party, now with the Center for Defense of Democracies.

Gary Schmitt of the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative think-tank, said it did not matter much who in the administration took which position. What mattered was what Bush himself believed and said.

SUCCESS IN IRAQ POSSIBLE

"Bush has never moved away from his policy agenda and since winning reelection has asserted it again. He thinks success is possible in Iraq and he has no intention of allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons," he said.

Iraq was a key issue in the U.S. presidential campaign with the defeated Democratic challenger John Kerry arguing that decision to invade was based on false premises and that the U.S. occupation had been badly mismanaged.

"Bush regards the election as a vindication of his Iraq policy. All the nay-sayers, the doubters, the defeatists have emerged as losers," said Clarke.

Some argue that the Iraqi experience has made it virtually impossible for Bush to contemplate another such war. With its troops badly overstretched and the costs of the occupation mounting, it is hard to imagine he would enjoy much domestic support, let alone international backing.

"Whatever some hawks might like to do, the reality is that the Bush administration will face a series of constraints -- military, diplomatic, political and economic -- that will curb its ability to launch new preventive wars," said James Mann, of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in an online article for Foreign Policy Magazine.

In the case of Iran, Bush might have little appetite and little ability to launch a full-scale invasion. However, he could still order lesser military action, such as massive air strikes to destroy the Iranian nuclear program.

"That could happen. It's absolutely feasible," said Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim.

Naim noted that U.S. administrations for decades had employed air strikes as an instrument of policy. Former President Bill Clinton used air power against Serbia and launched missile strikes against Afghanistan and Sudan.

"There's nothing new about using air strikes. That would be the continuation of a traditional tool of U.S. foreign policy," he said.

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The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Bono's New Casualty: 'Private Ryan'

The New York Times > Arts > Frank Rich: Bono's New Casualty: 'Private Ryan'

Rich analyzes far beyond the Ryan incident itself. PAB

LRB | Corey Robin : Dedicated to Democracy

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n22/print/robi02_.html


[London Review of B]

LRB | Vol. 26 No. 22 dated 18 November 2004 | Corey Robin

Dedicated to Democracy
Corey Robin

The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War by Greg Grandin
Chicago, 311 pp, £40.00

On 5 December 1982, Ronald Reagan met the Guatemalan president, Efraín
Ríos Montt, in Honduras. It was a useful meeting for Reagan. 'Well, I
learned a lot,' he told reporters on Air Force One. 'You'd be
surprised. They're all individual countries.' It was also a useful
meeting for Ríos Montt. Reagan declared him 'a man of great personal
integrity . . . totally dedicated to democracy', and claimed that the
Guatemalan strongman was getting 'a bum rap' from human rights
organisations for his military's campaign against leftist guerrillas.
The next day, one of Guatemala's elite platoons entered a jungle
village called Las Dos Erres and killed 162 of its inhabitants, 67 of
them children. Soldiers grabbed babies and toddlers by their legs,
swung them in the air, and smashed their heads against a wall. Older
children and adults were forced to kneel at the edge of a well, where
a single blow from a sledgehammer sent them plummeting below. The
platoon then raped a selection of women and girls it had saved for
last, pummelling their stomachs in order to force the pregnant among
them to miscarry. They tossed the women into the well and filled it
with dirt, burying an unlucky few alive. The only traces of the bodies
later visitors would find were blood on the walls and placentas and
umbilical cords on the ground.

Amid the hagiography surrounding Reagan's death in June, it was
probably too much to expect the media to mention his meeting with Ríos
Montt. After all, it wasn't Reykjavik. But Reykjavik's shadow - or
that cast by Reagan speaking in front of the Berlin Wall - does not
entirely explain the silence about this encounter between presidents.
While it's tempting to ascribe the omission to American amnesia, a
more likely cause is the deep misconception about the Cold War under
which most Americans labour. To the casual observer, the Cold War was
a struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, fought and
won through stylish jousting at Berlin, antiseptic arguments over
nuclear stockpiles, and the savvy brinkmanship of American leaders.
Latin America seldom figures in popular or even academic discussion of
the Cold War, and to the extent that it does, it is Cuba, Chile and
Nicaragua rather than Guatemala that earn most of the attention.

But, as Greg Grandin shows in The Last Colonial Massacre, Latin
America was as much a battleground of the Cold War as Europe, and
Guatemala was its front line. In 1954, the US fought its first major
contest against Communism in the Western hemisphere when it overthrew
Guatemala's democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had
worked closely with the country's small but influential Communist
Party. That coup sent a young Argentinian doctor fleeing to Mexico,
where he met Fidel Castro. Five years later, Che Guevara declared that
1954 had taught him the impossibility of peaceful, electoral reform
and promised his followers that 'Cuba will not be Guatemala.' In 1966,
Guatemala was again the pacesetter, this time pioneering the
'disappearances' that would come to define the dirty wars of
Argentina, Uruguay, Chile and Brazil. In a lightning strike,
US-trained security officials captured some thirty leftists, tortured
and executed them, and then dropped most of their corpses into the
Pacific. Explaining the operation in a classified memo, the CIA wrote:
'The execution of these persons will not be announced and the
Guatemalan government will deny that they were ever taken into
custody.' With the 1996 signing of a peace accord between the
Guatemalan military and leftist guerrillas, the Latin American Cold
War finally came to an end - in the same place it had begun - making
Guatemala's the longest and most lethal of the hemisphere's civil
wars. Some 200,000 men, women and children were dead, virtually all at
the hands of the military: more than were killed in Argentina,
Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Nicaragua and El Salvador combined, and
roughly the same number as were killed in the Balkans. Because the
victims were primarily Mayan Indians, Guatemala today has the only
military in Latin America deemed by a UN-sponsored truth commission to
have committed acts of genocide.

The Last Colonial Massacre reminds us that when we talk about
America's victory in the Cold War, we are talking about countries like
Guatemala, where Communism was fought and defeated by means of the
mass slaughter of civilians. But Grandin is interested in more than
tallying body counts and itemising atrocities. The task he sets
himself is to locate this most global of contests in the smallest of
places, to find beneath the duelling composure of superpower rivalry a
bloody conflict over rights and inequality, to see behind a simple
morality tale of good triumphing over evil the more ambivalent
settlement that was - and is - the end of the Cold War. Mounting the
most powerful case to date against the know-nothing triumphalism of
Cold War historians and the smug complacency of the American media,
Grandin's book also performs a modest act of restorative justice: it
allows Guatemalans to tell their own stories in their own words. In a
series of remarkable biographies Grandin shows how men and women made
high politics and high politics made them, demonstrating that the Cold
War was waged not only in the airy game rooms of nuclear strategists
but 'in the closed quarters of family, sex and community'.

The book opens with an epigraph from Sartre: 'A victory described in
detail is indistinguishable from a defeat.' The victory Grandin refers
to here is singular and by now virtually complete: that of the United
States over Communism. But the defeats he describes are various, their
consequences still unfolding. First is the defeat of the Latin
American left, whose aspirations ranged from the familiar (armed
seizure of state power) to the surprising (the creation of
capitalism). Next is the defeat of a continental social democracy
which would allow citizens to exercise a greater share of power - and
to receive a greater share of its benefits - than historically had
been their due. Finally, and most important, is the defeat of that
still elusive dream of men and women freeing themselves, thanks to
their own reason and willed effort, from the bonds of tradition and
oppression. This had been the dream of the transatlantic
Enlightenment, and throughout the Cold War American leaders argued on
its behalf (or some version of it) in the struggle against Communism.
But in Latin America, Grandin shows, it was the left who took up the
Enlightenment's banner, leaving the United States and its allies
carrying the black bag of the counter-Enlightenment. More than
foisting on the United States the unwanted burden of liberal
hypocrisy, the Cold War inspired it to embrace some of the most
reactionary ideals and revanchist characters of the 20th century.

According to Grandin, the Latin American left brought liberalism and
progress to a land awash in feudalism. Well into the 20th century, he
shows, Guatemala's coffee planters presided over a regime of forced
labour that was every bit as medieval as tsarist Russia. Using
vagrancy laws and the lure of easy credit, the planters amassed vast
estates and a workforce of peasants who essentially belonged to them.
Reading like an excerpt from Gogol's Dead Souls, one advertisement
from 1922 announced the sale of '5000 acres and many mozos colonos who
will travel to work on other plantations'. (Mozos colonos were
indebted labourers.) While unionised workers elsewhere were itemising
what their employers could and could not ask of them, Guatemala's
peasants were forced to provide a variety of compulsory services,
including sex. Two planters in the Alta Verapaz region, cousins from
Boston, used their Indian cooks and corn grinders to sire more than a
dozen children. 'They fucked anything that moved,' a neighbouring
planter observed. Though plantations were mini-states - with private
jails, stockades and whipping posts - planters also depended on the
army, judges, mayors and local constables to force workers to submit
to their will. Public officials routinely rounded up independent or
runaway peasants, shipping them off to plantations or forcing them to
build roads. One mayor had local vagrants paint his house. As much as
anything Grandin cites, it is this view of political power as a form
of private property which confirms his observation that by 1944 'only
five Latin America countries - Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, Costa Rica and
Colombia - could nominally call themselves democracies.'

And then, within two years, it all changed. By 1946, only five
countries - Paraguay, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and the
Dominican Republic - could not be called democracies. Turning the
anti-Fascist rhetoric of the Second World War against the hemisphere's
old regimes, leftists overthrew dictators, legalised political
parties, built unions and extended the franchise. Galvanised by the
New Deal and the Popular Front, reformers declared, in the words of
the Guatemalan president Juan José Arévalo, that 'we are socialists
because we live in the 20th century.' The entire continent was fired
by a combination of Karl Marx, the Declaration of Independence and
Walt Whitman, but Guatemala burned the brightest. There, a
decades-long struggle to break the back of the coffee aristocracy
culminated in the 1950 election of Arbenz, who with the help of a
small circle of Communist advisers instituted the Agrarian Reform of
1952. This redistributed a million and half acres to a hundred
thousand families, and also gave peasants a significant share of
political power. Local land reform committees, made up primarily of
peasant representatives, bypassed the planter-dominated municipal
government and provided peasants and their unions with a platform from
which to make and win their claims for equity.

Arguably the most audacious experiment in direct democracy the
continent had ever seen, the Agrarian Reform entailed a central irony,
critical to Grandin's argument about the Latin American left. The
legislation's authors - most of them Communists - were not building
socialism: they were creating capitalism. Scrupulous about property
rights and the rule of law - peasants had to back their claims with
extensive documentation; only unused land was expropriated; planters
were guaranteed multiple rights of appeal, all the way to the
president - the Agrarian Reform imposed a regime of separated powers
that was almost as cumbersome as James Madison's Constitution.
(According to one of the bill's Communist authors, 'it was a bourgeois
law.' When grassroots activists complained about the slowness of
reform, Arbenz responded: 'I don't care! You have to do things
right!') As Grandin points out, the Agrarian Reform turned landless
peasants into property owners, giving them the bargaining power to
demand higher wages from their employers - in the hope that they would
become 'consumers of national manufactures', while 'planters,
historically addicted to cheap, often free labour and land', would be
forced to 'invest in new technologies' and thereby 'make a profit'.

Guatemala's socialists did more than create democrats and capitalists.
They also made peasants into citizens. While liberals and
conservatives have long claimed that leftist ideologies reduced their
adherents to automatons, Grandin shows that leftist ideals and
movements awakened peasants to their own power, giving them extensive
opportunities to speak for themselves and to act on their own behalf.
Efraín Reyes Maaz, for example, was a Mayan peasant organiser, born in
the same year as the Bolshevik Revolution. 'If I hadn't studied Marx I
would be chicha ni limonada,' Reyes told Grandin. 'I'd be nothing. But
reading nourished me and here I am. I could die today and nobody could
take that from me.' Where other peasants seldom ventured beyond their
plantations, the Communist Party inspired Reyes to travel to Mexico
and Cuba, and he returned to Guatemala with the conviction that 'every
revolutionary carries around an entire world in his head.' The
Communist Party did not require Reyes to give up everything he knew;
it gave him ample freedom to synchronise the indigenous and the
European, making for a 'Mayan Marxism' that was every bit as supple as
the hybrid Marxism developed in Central Europe between the wars. When
anti-Communists put an end to this democratic awakening in 1954, it
was as much the peasant's newfound appetite for thinking and talking
as the planter's expropriated land that they were worried about. As
Guatemala's archbishop complained, the Arbencistas sent peasants
'gifted with facility with words' to the nation's capital, where they
were 'taught . . . to speak in public'.

Hoping to stifle this riot of thought and talk, Guatemala's Cold
Warriors fused a romantic aversion to the modern world with the most
up-to-date technologies of propaganda and violence (imported from the
United States), making their effort more akin to Fascism than to a
fight for liberal democracy. Here, Grandin again breaks new ground,
capturing the delicate amalgam of reason and reaction, elitism and
populism, that was the Latin American counter-revolution. Relying on
the power of the Catholic Church, the regime that replaced Arbenz had
prelates preach the gospel against Communism and socialism, and also
against democracy, liberalism and feminism. Reaching back to the
rhetoric of opposition to the French Revolution, the Church fathers
characterised the Cold War as a struggle between the City of God and
'the city of the devil incarnate' and complained that Arbenz, 'far
from uniting our people in their advance toward progress',
'disorganises them into opposing bands'. The Arbencistas, they
claimed, were 'professional corrupters of the feminine soul',
elevating women with 'gifts of proselytism or leadership' to 'high and
well-paid positions in official bureaucracy'. Because the Church
elders were sometimes too fastidious to whip up the masses, emigrés
from Republican Spain, who were partial to Franco and Mussolini,
frequently took their place, calling for a more ecstatic faith to
counter Communism's appeal: 'We do not want a cold Catholicism. We
want holiness, ardent, great and joyous holiness . . . intransigent
and fanatical.'

While the Cold Warriors' ideals looked backwards, their weapons -
furnished by the United States - looked forwards. (Indeed, one of the
Americans' chief justifications for their interventions during the
Cold War was that US involvement would contain not only Communism, but
also, in the words of the State Department, a right-wing
'counterinsurgency running wild'. Instead of a savage 'white terror',
US-trained security forces would work with the anti-Communist
'democratic left' - yesterday's third way - to fight a more
'rational', 'modern' and 'professional' Cold War.) During the 1954
coup, the CIA turned to Madison Avenue, pop sociologies and the
literature of mass psychology to create the illusion of large-scale
opposition to Arbenz. Radio shows spread rumours of an underground
resistance, inciting wobbly army officers to abandon their oath to the
democratically elected president. In subsequent decades, the CIA
outfitted Guatemala with a centralised domestic intelligence agency,
equipped with phones, radios, cameras, typewriters, carbon paper,
filing cabinets, surveillance equipment - and guns, ammunition and
explosives. The CIA also brought together the military and the police
in sleek urban command centres, where intelligence could be quickly
analysed, distributed, acted on and archived for later use. After
these efforts achieved their most spectacular results, with the 1966
disappearance of Guatemala's last generation of peaceful leftists,
guerrillas began seriously to organise armed opposition in rural
areas. In response, the regime threw into the countryside an army so
modernised - and well trained and equipped by the US - that by 1981 it
could conduct the first colour-coded genocide in history: 'Military
analysts marked communities and regions according to colours. White
spared those thought to have no rebel influence. Pink identified areas
in which the insurgents had limited presence; suspected guerrillas and
their supporters were to be killed but the communities left standing.
Red gave no quarter: all were to be executed and villages razed.'

Referring to a 1978 military massacre of Indians in Panzós, a river
town in the Polochic Valley, the title of Grandin's book brilliantly
evokes this mixture of modern and anti-modern elements. On 29 May that
year, roughly five hundred Mayan peasants assembled in the town centre
to ask the mayor to hear their complaints against local planters,
which were to be presented by a union delegation from the capital.
Firing on the protesters, a military detachment killed somewhere
between 34 and a hundred men, women and children. At first glance, the
massacre seems like nothing so much as a repetition of Guatemala's
colonial past: humble Indian petitioners ask public officials to
intercede on their behalf against local rulers; government forces in
league with the planters respond with violence; Indians wind up
floating down the river or go home. On closer inspection, the massacre
bears all the marks of the 20th century. The Indians were led by
leftist activists - one of them an indigenous woman - trained by
clandestine Communist organisers. They worked with unions, based in
the capital, reflecting the left's attempt to nationalise local
grievances. For their part, the soldiers firing on the peasants were
more than a local constabulary defending the interests of the
planters. They were a contingent of Guatemala's newly trained army,
spoke fluent anti-Communism, and wielded Israeli-made Galil assault
rifles, suggesting not just the nationalisation but the
internationalisation of Guatemala's traditional struggles over land
and labour.

Though the Cold War in Latin America began as a tense negotiation
between American rationalism and Latin revanchism, Grandin suggests
that it ended with the US careening towards the latter. In a rerun of
the fabled journey into the heart of darkness, US officials returned
from their travels south echoing the darkest voices of the
counter-Enlightenment. One embassy officer wrote to his superiors back
home: 'After all hasn't man been a savage from the beginning of time
so let us not be too queasy about terror. I have literally heard these
arguments from our people.' A CIA staffer urged his colleagues to
abandon all attempts at mass persuasion in Guatemala and instead
direct their efforts at the 'heart, the stomach and the liver (fear)'.
Seeking to destabilise Allende's Chile, another CIA man proclaimed:
'We cannot endeavour to ignite the world if Chile itself is a placid
lake. The fuel for the fire must come from within Chile. Therefore,
the station should employ every stratagem, every ploy, however
bizarre, to create this internal resistance.' As Grandin writes, 'Will
to set the world ablaze . . . faith in the night-side of the soul,
contempt for democratic temperance and parliamentary procedure: these
qualities are usually attributed to opponents of liberal civility,
tolerance and pluralism - not their defenders.' With this plangent
remark, Grandin concludes his remarkable tale, suggesting that the
greatest defeat of the Cold War could be said to be that of America
itself.

But there may have been one more defeat, which Grandin's book suggests
not by explicit argument but by the force of its analysis. For all its
violence and misery, the Cold War had the virtue of imposing on
Western intellectuals, Communist and anti-Communist alike, the duty of
historical intelligence. Marxism attracted its share of morally blind
and politically repellent followers, but its varied currents carried
scholars and writers - in happy or unhappy conveyance - to an
unparalleled appreciation of the effects of time and place. Whether it
was Lukács discerning the failed revolutions of 1848 in the stilted
realism and archaic dialogue of Flaubert's Salammbô or Louis Hartz
attributing American liberalism to the absence of feudalism in the
United States or George Steiner hearing the 'hoofbeats' of Napoleon's
armies in Hegel's Phenomenology ('the master statement of the new
density of being'), Marxism pressed intellectuals of varying stripes
to think about history's wayward intrusions. Even W.W. Rostow - the
most anti-Communist of anti-Communism's 'action intellectuals', to
borrow a phrase from Arno Mayer - was forced by the challenge of
Marxism to offer an economic and political programme that tallied,
however minimally, the persistent effects of colonialism throughout
the postcolonial world.

But the collapse of Communism and disappearance of Marxism have eased
the burdens of intelligence. With the market - and now religion -
displacing social democracy as the language of public life, writers
are no longer compelled by the requirements of the historical
imagination. Facing a new enemy, which does not make the same demands
that Communism once did, today's intellectuals wave away all talk of
'root causes': history, it seems, will no longer be summoned to the
bar of political analysis - or not for the time being. Mimicking the
theological language of their antagonists, contemporary writers prefer
catchwords such as 'evil' and 'Islamo-fascism' to the vocabulary of
secular criticism. Their language may be a response to 9/11, but it is
a product of the end of the Cold War. When Marxism was banished from
the political scene in 1989, it left behind no successor language -
save religion itself - to grapple with the twinned fortunes of the
individual and the collective, the personal and the political, the
present and the past. That Grandin has managed to salvage some portion
of that historical vision from the dustbin of history suggests not
only his resourcefulness, but also the timeliness of this most
untimely of meditations.

Corey Robin teaches at Brooklyn College, City University of New York.
He is the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea.

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20 November 2004



--
Paul A. Bove
Professor of English
University of Pittsburgh
Editor, boundary 2

The New York Times > Washington > Some Democrats Believe the Party Should Get Religion

The New York Times > Washington > Some Democrats Believe the Party Should Get Religion

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Slapping the Other Cheek

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Slapping the Other Cheek

MSNBC - Clash of Civilizations

MSNBC - Clash of Civilizations

In Hideout, Foreign Arabs Share Vision of 'Martyrdom' (washingtonpost.com)If

In Hideout, Foreign Arabs Share Vision of 'Martyrdom' (washingtonpost.com)

If you resist a secular position, consider this story to understand what happens to 'men of faith.' P

Liberals Dismayed by 'Moral Values' Claims

The New York Times > AP > National > Liberals Dismayed by 'Moral Values' Claims: "The New York Times

More reason than ever, I suppose, to become religious and compromise with religious feelings . . . . Woe are we secularists who dare not believe!


The New York Times

November 9, 2004
Liberals Dismayed by 'Moral Values' Claims
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 10:22 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Family values, traditional values and now, ``moral values.'' Most American adults would say they have them, and yet that two-word phrase is the focus of an ideological tug-of-war heightened by President Bush's re-election, with conservatives declaring principal ownership and liberals scrambling to challenge them.

``We need to work really hard at reclaiming some language,'' said the Rev. Robert Edgar, general secretary of the liberal-leaning National Council of Churches.

``The religious right has successfully gotten out there shaping personal piety issues -- civil unions, abortion -- as almost the total content of 'moral values,''' Edgar said. ``And yet you can't read the Old Testament without knowing God was concerned about the environment, war and peace, poverty. God doesn't want 45 million Americans without health care.''

Many of the advocacy groups that helped mobilize conservative voters for Bush concentrate on a narrow range of issues -- notably opposing abortion and gay rights. Conservative leaders say these were the main issues on voters' minds when many, in exit polls, designated unspecified ``moral values'' as their foremost Election Day priority.

``Those who view the appeal to 'moral values' as mere political manipulation and ideological posturing have a basic misunderstanding of people of faith,'' said Janice Shaw Crouse of the conservative Concerned Women for America.

``The 'moral values' that were a top priority in this election -- abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, same-sex unions -- are rooted in deep religious beliefs.''

Such statements of moral grounding have frustrated Democratic-leaning activists -- in past campaigns and particularly this year. They question the vagueness of the ``moral values'' exit poll question and contend that their own political priorities, such as fighting poverty and discrimination, have moral weight and popular support.

Proponents of same-sex unions, for example, believe it is moral to afford partnership rights to two men or two women who have committed themselves to each other and, in many cases, are raising children.

``We have a thing or two to say about the 'moral values' involved with permitting a couple who wish to build a life together to enjoy full legal standing as a family,'' said Ron Schlittler, director of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays.

Similarly, abortion-rights advocates believe it is moral to allow the option of abortion to a poor, newly pregnant woman, rather than compel her to bear a child she didn't plan for and cannot afford to raise.

``When the religious right co-opted the term 'pro-life,' that was a coup,'' said the Rev. Carlton Veazey of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice. ``Sometimes 'choice' sounds too casual.''

``We have to go back and examine what we are we saying, why is it not resonating,'' Veazey added. ``We don't just cave in and say they've got a monopoly on morality.''

Asked if their rivals on the left indeed held viable moral values, several conservatives replied with a qualified ``yes,'' suggesting the liberals' social concerns were valid but not as important as opposition to abortion or same-sex marriage.

``We believe in biblical principles; I'm sure they believe in biblical principles,'' said Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition of America. ``But I don't understand how they can defend abortion and homosexuality. That's wrong.''

The Rev. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life said poverty was far less urgent a problem then abortion, which he considers genocide.

``The other side has not been deprived of the opportunity to make their case,'' he said. ``Voters can think for themselves.''

Some put the issue even more starkly.

``There is no reconciliation between good and evil,'' wrote Mary Ann Kreitzer of Les Femmes, an organization of conservative Roman Catholic women. ``Voters rejected the party of gay activists, radical feminists, the Hollywood elite, pornographers, death-peddlers, anti-Christian bigots and apostate Catholics.''

For some moderates, the values debate is less simple -- they may oppose abortion and gay marriage yet share liberals' view on other issues.

Mike Allen of Catholic Charities of Trenton, which serves the needy in southern New Jersey, said his organization's mission entails seeking ``a more just and compassionate society'' on for the disadvantaged.

Regarding partisan promotion of ``moral values,'' Allen said, ``Oversimplifying is a technique that seems to win elections.''

The Rev. Thomas Reese, editor of the Jesuit weekly America, said John Kerry could have been more effective at portraying his goals -- fairer wages, better health care -- as ``moral values.''

``The Democratic Party seems almost embarrassed talking about family issues or religion,'' he said.

A future battleground in the values tug-of-war will be for black and Hispanic support. Some conservatives believe wariness of gay marriage will enable Republicans to steadily win more of their votes.

``You're seeing a bridge being built between African-Americans and evangelicals who tend to be Republican,'' said Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. ``Right now that dialogue is focused on marriage, but as we share and learn, you'll see it broadening.''

However, the Rev. Stephen Bouman, a New York-based bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, worries that conservative Christians' definition of ``moral values'' may be too narrow to accommodate those of different faiths and backgrounds, including new immigrants.

``One thing Jesus was absolutely clear about was helping the poor, and the welcoming of strangers,'' Bouman said. ``Maybe this election was a wake-up call to have a serious conversation about what morality means, to look at what sort of country we're becoming.''

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The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Voting Without the Facts

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: Voting Without the Facts

Herbert is the counter-Kristof and his attention to ignorance should scare us, but it also allows us to make use of 'stupidity' as a critical sign. PAB