(Article changed on May 6, 2013 at 11:30)
The US experiences
"blowback" from its worldwide brutality and violence, and those who publicly
make the connection between anti-us terrorism and US foreign policy also experience
blowback in the form of verbal attacks from government and media pundits. This
spectacle happened once again in the recent case of Richard Falk, a prominent
spokesperson for transforming the world system toward peace with justice
(Professor emeritus from Princeton), who today is UN Special Rapporteur on
Human Rights for Palestine.
For years,
progressives like Noam Chomsky, William Blum, and William Boardman have been
pointing out that establishment pundits and government officials systematically
attack any person who point out the obvious fact that worldwide attacks on the
US and its citizens or officials often follow from the horrific things the US
has done to other people worldwide. Falk published a well-reasoned article in
the journal Foreign Policy, dated 21
April 2013, that connected the recent bombings at the Boston Marathon with U.S.
global foreign policy. The article was in fact restrained and factual, pointing
out the need for thoughtful self-reflection concerning US policy that might be activated
by seeing these bombings as blowback. Falk had the audacity, however, to
suggest that the US "learn" from its foreign policy, and that its unrelenting
violence might not be the most successful course of action: "the American
global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance in the
post-colonial world."
The response by
establishment media and pundits was overwhelming, calling for Falk to be fired.
The Washington Times (April 26th) accused him of anti-Semitism and
"radical Islamic" leanings. Government officials in the US, Britain, and Canada
called for his resignation. The US Ambassador to the UN demanded that he be
fired. Exaggerations and distortions of what Falk actually wrote filled the
mainstream media. Naturally Falk was defended by the left, and many
progressives addressed this situation and agreed with his assessment that there
are connections between US foreign policy and violent anti-US attacks both
within and outside the US.
In his Anti-Empire report, number
116, on May 3rd, William Blum writes about the "Boston Marathon,
this thing called terrorism, and the United States" in ways similar to the
general reaction on the left, defending Richard Falk and affirming the
connection between US policy and anti-US terrorism. Blum cites some of the
substantial evidence he assembled in his books Rogue State and Killing Hope
to review the quest for US world domination throughout the post-WW II
period. Blum writes concerning Boston
Marathon event: " Let us hope that the distinguished
statesmen, military officers, and corporate leaders who own and rule America
find out in this life that to put an end to anti-American terrorism they're
going to have to learn to live without unending war against the world". But
this change in consciousness in the elite is going to be extremely difficult,
as difficult as it appears to be for the parents of the two boys to accept
their sons' guilt."
But
this reaction, also found in Chomsky, Boardman ("The Crucification of Richard
Falk," RSN, April 30) and many others defending Falk, tends to leave out the
structural analysis of the world system that forms perhaps the most significant
intellectual development of the past two centuries. Structuralists of various orientations have
included Karl Marx, H.G. Wells, Arnold Toynbee, Michel Foucault, Johan Galtung,
Herbert Marcuse, Ervin Laszlo, and Immanuel Wallerstein. What these thinkers
have in common is the penetrating insight that the social, political, and
economic systems significantly condition human consciousness and behavior. It is not all about "learning to live without
unending war against the world." In
fact, the "learning" that is called for by Falk and Blum may be next to
impossible within the current world order.
Chomsky
writings have consistently reviewed the amazing "hypocrisy" of US leaders who
say one thing (about human rights, freedom, etc.) and do exactly the
opposite. He says that in the US terms
of political discourse have two meanings: "One is the dictionary meaning, and
the other is the meaning that is useful for serving power--the doctrinal
meaning" (What Uncle Sam Really Wants, p.
86). He accuses officials in power (and
academics) in the US of deceiving the public by hypocritically using political terms
with meanings that really are the opposite of their dictionary meaning. But, as in Blum's analysis (and like Falk's
analysis) this explanation is too simple.
How,
we might ask, does the US consistently find so many hypocrites to fill its many
governmental posts around the world? How
is it that US officials have been unable to "learn" from US foreign policy
after so many hundreds of debacles worldwide since World War II? Are they really that stupid, or that
hypocritical? A full answer to these
questions brings in an analysis that neither Chomsky nor Blum nor Falk wish to seriously
consider, for they all have embedded their own consciousness in the world
system as it happens to be at this moment in history, and they do not wish to
"learn" that the world system itself is not working and cannot work and must be
changed if we are to survive and flourish much longer on this planet. You
cannot evolve a structural war-system into a peace-system. You must establish a
peace-system from the very beginning.
Some have accused structuralism of leaving out human consciousness, as if people were merely robots whose behavior is determined by the systems within which they live. But this response really attacks a straw man, for structuralists have rarely omitted human accountability and responsibility, as the ethical undertone of many of Marx's writes makes clear. In terms of psychology, it is fairly clear that if you create a national security state as in the US (or the former Soviet Union) and make blind loyalty a prerequisite for service to the state (in the form of security clearances, etc.), you are going to attract to that service the kind of persons that Marcuse called "one-dimensional," that is, people with little capacity to critically evaluate their own society or their own role within society.
On one level, of course, these progressives are correct that US leaders and their media and academic pundit supporters are dishonest, corrupt, and hypocritical. I am not disputing this in the slightest. There are few morally mature or seriously thoughtful people within the US establishment. A virtuous and morally mature character is almost a disqualification for being rich and powerful within the US system.
But
the real situation goes deeper than this.
If you divide humanity into some 193 mostly militarized "sovereign" entities
that recognize no effective law above themselves (because of their "rights" as sovereign
states), then human consciousness is going to be significantly impacted by this
fragmented set of global structures. Many scholars identify the Peace Treaty at
Westphalia in 1648 as the first embodiment in an international agreement of
what became the system of sovereign nation-states. We are living within a
system that first developed more than three and a half centuries ago and
somehow assume that this is the way things should be on the Earth (everyone
respect everyone else's right to recognize no enforceable laws above
themselves).
As
a consequence of this system, people are going to think in terms of their
nationalities, developing a powerful unconscious loyalty to the provincial,
arbitrary territories into which they happen to be born. (For a revealing study
of the arbitrariness of national "communities" see Benedict Anderson's classic,
Imagined Communities.) People will
almost automatically operate in terms of a nationalized consciousness: national
interests, national loyalties, national defenses, national security, national
pride, national fear, national hatred of others, etc. It will not matter that science for the past
century has indubitably shown that we are one species (which Marx called our
"species-being"), substantially genetically identical with one another everywhere
on Earth and manifesting everywhere what anthropologist Donald E. Brown calls
"human universals."
Just
as global capitalism causes a competitive "I win/you lose" attitude in
corporations and people everywhere, so the system of territorial sovereign
nation-states causes an unconscious fragmented point of view in the people born
into this system. Most of the people in government attacking progressives like
Falk (who insists that we learn from history) are not so much hypocrites as
one-dimensional representatives of a fragmented human structural situation.
Chomsky
and Blum are forever urging that the US respect the "sovereignty" of Cuba or
the "sovereignty" of Iran, assuming some unlikely vision that absolute
fragments might somehow coexist in the future: cooperatively, nonviolently, and
peacefully. However, it cannot happen without changing the structures that
condition both our economic and political relationships. This attitude of
claiming the US should respect the sovereignty of other nations only
strengthens the very structures that diminish our holistic human dignity and
equality. We are one Earth and one race upon the Earth, and this fact needs to
be reflected structurally in a single, planetary economic and political
democracy.
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